“Since a very young age, my attention has always been on signs of every kind.” 

—Ed Ruscha

Signs, in a certain sense, have defined the creative oeuvre of Ed Ruscha. His interest in the visual and conceptual tensions between text and image began in his early experiences with hand-painted signs, from watching the subtle artistry of a man hand-letter the complete menu for a drive-in hamburger stand as a child in his native Oklahoma, to dabbling as a freelance commercial sign-painter himself in the late 1950’s as he relocated from his home state to California. Soon after, it was the signs of Los Angeles that caught his attention: the business signs that line the Sunset Strip, the signs that give mid-century apartment complexes their names, and most famously, the ever-looming Hollywood sign. Ruscha’s utilization of these signs – their words, their typefaces – offer a new interpretation of landscape, defined by the interventions of language upon it.  

Published by Mixografia, these Rusty Signs utilize the workshop’s proprietary technique for printing high relief works that are uniquely textured with immense surface detail; the mottled surface is evocative of a truly weathered sign. Rusty Signs represents a departure from Ruscha’s typical employment of sign iconography, embodying new aesthetic concerns. Shaye Remba, director of Mixografia, explained, “no longer do we see a fictionalized representation (e.g. the Hollywood sign ablaze), or a limited one (the carefully cropped photos of Some Los Angeles Apartments), but we actually see the sign itself, and its physicality is a part of its essence.”

As part of this recreation, each sign proclaims information like “CASH FOR TOOLS,” “DEAD END,” or “FOR SALE” in Boy Scout Utility Modern – Ruscha’s proprietary font, which squares off the letters’ typical rounded edges, much like the typeface of the Hollywood sign. Ruscha’s decision to produce multiple variations of each sign further gives the impression that they have been weathered by time in varying ways, as if they came from different locations, subjected to different circumstances: some are given the sense of having bullet holes, while others appear to be missing sections or have accumulated thick layers of rust and grime. As a result, each of the Rusty Signs contains an independent story of a landscape, told through its implied history of neglect and decay. Ruscha himself would describe the prints as “neglected and forgotten signs from neglected and forgotten landscapes” of America, expressing the artist’s deepening preoccupation with the decay of the American dream.