all images © harlan erskine.
all rights reserved.
Photography
My image of Jen Stark's Piece of an Infinite Whole, was featured on the cover of the September 28 - October 4, 2013 issue of New Scientist.
Here is my original image –
Rather than quarantined in vitrines—though some are—the books on the walls offer their smells and textures to the viewer. The glossy, flimsy and colorful pages of Harlan Erskine’s Ten Convenient Stores (2005), for example, mimic those of magazines found within his convenient stores. Erskine’s book, clearly riffing on Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations, documents the stores’ exteriors, highlighting their neon signs, florescent interior lights and colorful advertisements plastered on the windows. The book’s thin glossy pages, however, tactilely move us through the stores’ front doors into the shelves of cheap commercial goods we know are there but cannot see.
Impressions Lately: Poetic gesture: Ed Ruscha Books & Co at Gagosian Gallery, NY
The New York Times: Ed Ruscha’s Books and Landscapes at Gagosian
E1F mediaproject Ed Ruscha. Books and Paintings – Museum Brandhorst – Munich
archphoto: Ed Ruscha. Books & Paintings / Books & co
Artlog: SEE In Love with Books
StrayCats: Ed Ruscha – Books & Co // München
Artist Portfolio Magazine: Ed Ruscha Books & Co at Gagosian Gallery
Parka Blogs: Book Review: VARIOUS SMALL BOOKS: Referencing Various Small Books by Ed Ruscha
Publishers weekly: Nonfiction Book Review: Various Small Books: Referencing Various Small Books
The New York Times: ‘Various Small Books,’ Inspired by Ed Ruscha, and More
BIG NEWS: my artist book,ten convenient stores will be featured in Ed Ruscha: Books & Co. at Gagosian Gallery, 980 Madison Avenue, New York. March 5 – April 27 2013.
Opening reception: Tuesday, March 5, 2013, 6 to 8 pm
ten convenient stores also features in Various Small Books, published this month by MIT Press:
Various Small Books: Press Release
In the 1960s and 1970s, the artist Ed Ruscha created a series of small photo-conceptual artist’s books, among them Twentysix Gas Stations, Various Small Fires, Every Building on the Sunset Strip,Thirtyfour Parking Lots, Real Estate Opportunities, and A Few Palm Trees. Featuring mundane subjects photographed prosaically, with idiosyncratically deadpan titles, these “small books” were sought after, collected, and loved by Ruscha’s fans and fellow artists. Over the past thirty years, close to 100 other small books that appropriated or paid homage to Ruscha’s have appeared throughout the world. This book collects ninety-one of these projects, showcasing the cover and sample layouts from each along with a description of the work. It also includes selections from Ruscha’s books and an appendix listing all known Ruscha book tributes.
These small books revisit, imitate, honor, and parody Ruscha in form, content, and title. Some rephotograph his subjects: Thirtyfour Parking Lots, Forty Years Later. Some offer a humorous variation: Various Unbaked Cookies (which concludes, as did Ruscha’s Various Small Fires, with a glass of milk), Twentynine Palms (twenty-nine photographs of palm-readers’ signs). Some say something different: None of the Buildings on Sunset Strip. Some reach for a connection with Ruscha himself: 17 Parked Cars in Various Parking Lots Along Pacific Coast Highway Between My House and Ed Ruscha’s.
With his books, Ruscha expanded the artist’s field of permissible subjects, approaches, and methods. With VARIOUS SMALL BOOKS, various artists pay tribute to Ed Ruscha and extend the legacy of his books.
Click here for sample page spreads.
Hardcover $39.95 Trade | £27.95 ISBN: 9780262018777 288 pp. | 6 x 9 in | 298 color illus., 55 b&w illus. February 2013
Copies of my book, ten convenient stores are available through my website here. I bound them in a limited edition of 100. See more images of the book below or click here.
