Artist, Ed Ruscha: I’d go back and forth between Oklahoma and California on the highway, on US 66 sometimes driving, sometimes hitchhiking. And I began to see the highway as source material. And I liked what I saw in the almost like nothingness, the quietude of traveling. And so there was one particular gas station from Amarillo, Texas that appealed to me.
Curator, Ana Torok: In Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half, we see the service station from Amarillo, Texas. You’re looking at the gas station almost from below. This strong diagonal composition elevates this humble roadside architecture into something monumental.
Ruscha would use the gas station motif again and again. Here, he adds a magazine onto the top right corner of the painting, disrupting any sense you might have gotten of illusionistic space. It’s hanging there and you’re not sure how.
Ed Ruscha: I wanted to bring unlike things together. And so it’s no different than maybe a piece of music that might have a coda at the end, or some other element that is unlike the rest of the work. Or I might add something to somehow antagonize the main theme. And that goes through with all my work. Sometimes there’s little oddities that I welcome.