Zoë Sadokierski

These two concertina photobooks are an homage to L.A. based photographer/artist/book maker Edward Ruscha. While researching artist’s books in New York’s Museum of Modern Art I accidentally became obsessed with Ruscha – or more specifically, how many other people are obsessed with Ruscha’s work. In 2013, MIT press published Various Small Books: Referencing Various Small Books by Ed Ruscha. The book collates ninety-one projects by artists who have appropriated or paid homage to Ruscha’s books, and includes an appendix listing all known Ruscha book tributes. Included are projects in which artists re-photograph Ruscha’s work – such as Thirtyfour Parking Lots, Forty Years Later (Susan Porteous 2007) – or riff off his conceptual and formal template – Various Unbaked Cookies and Milk (Marcella Hackbardt 2010). These two concertinas are made in response to Ruscha’s 1962 book Twentysix Gasoline Stations. They are visual lists of seemingly banal landscapes.

They accompany a print-on-demand book I produced about my research at the MoMA Library.