Capital Region photographer included in Ed Ruscha exhibition
The artist Ed Ruscha was standing in the middle of Gagosian's 24th Street gallery in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City on a cool fall day, surrounded by paintings of books he has created over many decades.
Ruscha also has a passion for road trips and the U.S. landscape, as evinced not just in his paintings but in his landmark first book, "Twentysix Gasoline Stations," from 1962.
Ruscha, who lives in Los Angeles, went on to produce scores of books, mostly about other everyday sights, like swimming pools, parking lots and palm trees.
Shunning the elite notion of the "livre d'artiste" — those luxurious, limited-edition works that are collaborations between artists and private presses — he reinvented the genre as something inexpensive, accessible and easy to produce.
Over the years these books have become a touchstone of conceptual art and have inspired a new generation of artists who came of age with computers and Photoshop.
Today there appears to be a kind of backlash against the digital universe, as artists are again embracing the notion of artist books despite the proliferation of electronic reading devices.
"The quality of images on the Internet is deplorable," said Monk, a Briton who lives in Berlin and creates books.
At the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, the demand for artist books and even exhibition catalogs has not diminished despite the availability of art books that can be seen online.
Throughout his career Ruscha has seen his books as an extension of paintings, especially his signature canvases that feature a word like "Damage," "Boss," "Faith" or "Noise" floating in the middle of the composition.
[...] paintings were important too.
[...] like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, whose work he saw in Paris in the late '50s, Ruscha turned his back on the Abstract Expressionists he grew up admiring and made his mark in a universe somewhere between p