Designer, Gail Anderson: These paintings are so much a slice of driving through America. These big, bland, stubby buildings with a giant sky behind them.
Curator, Ana Torok: In 1992, Ruscha began producing a series of black and white paintings of boxy industrial buildings. The work you’re standing in front of now, Blue Collar Tech-Chem, is part of a before and after pairing. Across the gallery, you’ll see a painting that Ruscha made in 2003, which revisits the site but reimagines the building as it might exist into the future. It’s quite an ominous picture with these fiery red skies.
Gail Anderson: When I look at The Old Tech-Chem Building, I see some ghost type on the side of the building that I’m curious about, and you wonder, “Why is it gone now? Who worked there? What life was like. What was the community around this?”
Ana Torok: Ruscha focuses on the upper part of these buildings, where the signage is: “Tech Chem,” “Tool and Die,” “Trade School.”
Gail Anderson: Vernacular signage is that piece of wherever you are in the world that might go away any minute now. They’ve got these amazing stories to tell in the way that looking at these paintings, you start to toss a story of your own into the mix of what could have gone on there. Pull over with your phone and snap a picture and create a story in your head, and save it because you’re going to go back and it’s going to be gone.