“That gas station had a polished newness that I just had to draw and then paint and then silkscreen and finally make into a book.” —Ed Ruscha
This novel edition of Ghost Station is the most recent exploration of Ruscha's signature Standard gas stations. Indeed, the most iconic image of his career, and a decades-long obsession, Ruscha has repeatedly revisited this subject, exploring Americana through the topography of the highway. As a young man, driving back and forth in his 1950 Ford Sedan, along route 66 between his hometown of Oklahoma City and Hollywood, Ruscha first turned his camera out onto these fuel stops.
“Route 66…It was like a continuous ribbon, it was like a real magical formula for keeping my life going.”
—Ed Ruscha
Playing with (in)visibility, Ghost Station is an inkless, Mixografia® print. The image is an outlined echo of its original rendering in the 1963 oil painting Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas. As such, the Mixografia® technique continues Ruscha's relationship with inventive printmaking. Here he leaves behind color and engages with purely material innovation. Unlike traditional embossing, Mixografia® allows for a three-dimensional print with "elements of relief, texture, and very fine surface detail." To achieve this three-dimensional relief, a wet cotton paper pulp was cast in the Mixografia® signature, hand-made copper plate mold and run through the press under high pressure. As a result, the work blurs the boundary between image and sculpture while also pushing the definition of an image as something that may not necessitate a color substrate of any kind, instead allowing an interplay of angular shadows to draw out the pitstop's graphic architecture. Ruscha's image of the station first encountered 60 years ago has therefore transformed into a 'Ghost,' both impressed within his memories and into the paper.