Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of the West of England, Bristol
Some of the Buildings on the Sunset Strip
This artist’s book is the major output from Sowden’s research about Ed Ruscha, whose sixteen conceptual photobooks (1962 and 1978) were highly influential and widely imitated. It contributes to the international debate and collective body of work examining the continuing influence of Ruscha’s books, including two recent (2013) studies by Burton and Zschiegner, and by Dziewior and Bregenz. Sowden’s Some of the Buildings on the Sunset Strip, a 15ft concertina, inkjet-printed book, containing colour photographs of some of the buildings on Sunset Strip with numbers, is both an homage to and a play on Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966), replicating the dimensions and format of the original. Drawing on Ruscha’s reinvention of the elite artists’ book as something inexpensive, accessible and easy to produce, as well as his focus on the everyday, Sowden’s photographs were taken during a small-scale intervention, a car journey along Sunset Boulevard.
Sowden’s work also explores ‘imitation’, producing copies that are ‘not quite the same’, as demonstrated in Follow-ed (after hokusai), a touring exhibition (2011). Sowden has contributed several journal articles reflecting on the process of producing the work and the continued influence and reinvention of Ruscha’s work, including: ‘Ruscha Rip-off, Ripout’ a photo-essay, Afterimage, vol. 37, no. 6 (May-June 2010) and ‘Follow-ed’, The Bonefolder, vol. 6, no. 1 (Fall 2009). Sowden’s book also formed part of an exhibition of his work by Street Road at the Parallax Art Fair, New York (November 2012) and the exhibitions: Ed Ruscha Books & Co, Gagosian Gallery, New York (March-April 2013); Museum Brandhorst, Munich (June onwards 2013) and Lost Highway 41 Revisited Blues, Street Road, Pennsylvania (September 2013). It is in the permanent collections of Tate Britain, Chelsea College of Art, Winchester School of Art, University for the Creative Arts (Farnham) and the Texas Gallery, Houston.
