Home With Complete Electronic Security System

Ed Ruscha, like many Pop artists of his generation, started in graphic design. Throughout his career, Ruscha has used the techniques of that field—an emphasis on clean lines, pleasing color choices, and relative simplicity—to produce images that question American ideals. Here a multicolored sky floats above a black landscape with an archetypal American farmhouse in the center. The image is undeniably pleasing, with the sky’s colors seamlessly bleeding into one another and the black landscape contrasting this haze. But superficially agreeable banality hides an undeniable isolation—the tiny house is nearly lost in the vast landscape. The title of the work goes further to explicate the solitude: the main point of a security system is to keep people out. Ruscha’s print can be seen as a critique of America’s valorization of individual achievement, highlighting that an extreme emphasis on individual success is necessarily accompanied by extraordinary loneliness. (“Imprint/ In Print,” curated by Nancy E. Green with assistance from Christian Waibel ’17 and presented at the Johnson Museum August 8 – December 20, 2015)