Amy Park’s Ed Ruscha’s: Every Building on the Sunset Strip

The year 2016 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Ed Ruscha’s twenty-five-foot-long accordion book, which remains one of the most iconic artist’s books of the past century. Park’s undertaking, to scale up and recreate every single page of Sunset Strip in watercolor, is equal parts homage to Ruscha, conceptual deconstruction of a historical document, and musing on the nature of the photographic image.

Today, the Sunset Strip is much like Times Square: filled with bright lights, excessive advertising, and tourists. However, in 1966 this mile-and-a-half stretch of West Hollywood was far sparser and quieter, a subject well suited to Ruscha’s austere yet pop-inflected vision. Park maintains the monochromatic color tones of the original black and white photography and consciously plays with the deadpan frontality that Ruscha brought into focus. The photographic sequence is not seamless, resulting in distinct breaks between images and lending Park’s watercolors a truly abstract quality as the viewer moves from piece to piece within the gallery space. In this sense, the installed work extends the notion that the images cannot be taken in all at once but must be seen sequentially, mimicking the way one might really experience the architecture while driving along the Sunset Boulevard.

Ultimately, this project links back to Park’s main concerns in the studio: finding her muse in the photographic, proposing that the abstract does exist in various modes of representation both mechanical and handmade, and delighting in the fastidious labor of the translation from eye to hand, and hand to eye.