21 × 17 in
 in
 cm
$2,500
This image from the artist’s Desert Houses series features a small building surrounded by scrublands, the flat tops of far-off mesas just visible in the background. Though not completely desolate—another building can be seen to the left and hints of a factory fade into the mountain mists—the crumbling slanted roof and gaping windows nonetheless suggest a feral, forgotten place, as do the words scored into the concrete bricks: ALFA and OMEGA. If the scene itself is not enough to remind the viewer that abandoned expanses still exist in America, despite rising populations and urbanization, the tone lent by the gelatin silver printing method takes this desolation one step further, the slight sepia tone not enough to warm this vast, lonely view.
| Medium | Photography |
| Signature | Signed |
| Frame | Framed |
| Condition | very good |
| Seller | Private |
| Location | Vancouver, Canada |
| Provenance | Private collection, Vancouver. |
Mark Ruwedel is an American landscape photographer and educator. His books include Westward the Course of Empire, which depicts the remains of abandoned railway lines in the landscape of the western United States and Canada; and Message from the Exterior, featuring abandoned and decaying houses in desert communities around Los Angeles.
Ruwedel was an associate professor at Concordia University, Montreal from 1984 to 2001 and has been a Professor of Art at California State University, Long Beach since 2002. He has homes in both California and coastal British Columbia.
In 2014, he was awarded both a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Scotiabank Photography Award. In 2018, he was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. He has had solo exhibitions at the Chinati Foundation, Presentation House Gallery, and the Southern Alberta Art Gallery. His work is held in the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Photography, National Gallery of Art, National Gallery of Canada, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Source: Tate
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