Text by Grant Arnold. Interview by Paul Roth, Gaëlle Morel.
Over the past three decades, Mark Ruwedel (born 1954) has examined the intersections of representation, cultural memory and shifting perceptions of space. His work is an epic account of North American civilization, extending from topologies of urban architecture to large-scale projects such as The Ice Age and Westward the Course of Empire. Ruwedel represents landscape as a site where radically different scales of time intertwine. Picturing the earth as an enormous historical archive, he describes his work as "an inquiry into the histories, cultural and natural, of places that reveal the land as both a field of human endeavor and an agent of historical processes." Ruwedel spotlights traces of human activity—whether an ancient footpath in Death Valley or a rotting wooden trestle abandoned after the failure of the Vancouver, Victoria and Eastern Railroad—in relation to geographic and geological upheavals that have shaped the earth's surface.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Photo-Eye Blog
Allie Haeusslein
Steidl beautifully translates the lush tonality and tactile quality of his black-and-white (and occasional color) photographs to the printed page, employing a straightforward layout that echoes the work’s minimal aesthetic. Presented individually and in chronological order, Ruwedel’s projects become more resonant when viewed within the context of his vast and tightly coherent oeuvre, marked by consistent formal, aesthetic and conceptual interests.
American Suburb
Eugenie Shinkle
Ruwedel’s austere, restrained images embrace the emptiness against which the American ethos is posed; they set the hubris that defines the frontier mentality against the visible remains of the longer histories that anticipated it.
FORMAT: Hbk, 12 x 10 in. / 228 pgs / illustrated throughout. LIST PRICE: U.S. $65.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $87 ISBN: 9783869309286 PUBLISHER: Steidl/Scotiabank AVAILABLE: 6/23/2015 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of print AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: NA ONLY
Published by Steidl/Scotiabank. Text by Grant Arnold. Interview by Paul Roth, Gaëlle Morel.
Over the past three decades, Mark Ruwedel (born 1954) has examined the intersections of representation, cultural memory and shifting perceptions of space. His work is an epic account of North American civilization, extending from topologies of urban architecture to large-scale projects such as The Ice Age and Westward the Course of Empire. Ruwedel represents landscape as a site where radically different scales of time intertwine. Picturing the earth as an enormous historical archive, he describes his work as "an inquiry into the histories, cultural and natural, of places that reveal the land as both a field of human endeavor and an agent of historical processes." Ruwedel spotlights traces of human activity—whether an ancient footpath in Death Valley or a rotting wooden trestle abandoned after the failure of the Vancouver, Victoria and Eastern Railroad—in relation to geographic and geological upheavals that have shaped the earth's surface.
