Mark Ruwedel, Los Angeles: Landscapes of Four Ecologies

“Scientists, despite their aversion to imprecision, mostly accept a division between harmful and benign invasiveness.   . . .  Ultimately that is a value judgment.”  

–Jared Farmer, Trees in Paradise: The Botanical Conquest of California (2017)

Opening at Gallery Luisotti on September 20, 2024, Mark Ruwedel, Los Angeles: Landscapes of Four Ecologies is one of many exhibitions in this fall’s Getty-coordinated PST ART: Art & Science Collide panoply. But don’t expect to find in Ruwedel’s work the POW! of collision. Ruwedel’s imagery exemplifies the different power of quiet intensity, the result of his ongoing investigations of the way we might read markings in the land made by both the ancient forces of nature and more-or-less recent cultural encroachment.

Many will recognize the “Four Ecologies” in Ruwedel’s titular rubric from the last decade as a bow to Reyner Banham’s Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971), a pioneering appreciation of L.A.’s distinctive built environment. Along with a bow, there is in Ruwedel’s work an about-face, for in his current series we see neither people nor sprawling buildings, freeways, functioning swimming pools and conventional beach scenes. The artist collects postcards – along with maps, field guides and some of the most probing cultural histories of the regional environment – but his aesthetic is cooly reflective instead of promotional.

After making photographs for decades of the quite varying landscape of southern California, Ruwedel in the last decade has developed four separate series, each of which is slated for its own book by MACK: “Rivers Runs Through It” (the first volume already published in 2023) – “The Western Edge”- “Mountains and Canyons” – “Haunted By The Desert.”  The quartet of works represents his systematic study of topographies variously marked by rivers, coasts, hills dropping into canyons, and the flatlands worked intensively for agriculture in the last two centuries but always subject to the depredations of temperature extremes and fire. This “Landscapes of Four Ecologies” exhibition marks the first time the photographer assembles selections from all four bodies of work to offer his expansive view of human society’s impact on nature in Greater Los Angeles.

In this PST ART exhibit of nearly three dozen carefully crafted pictures, one will find many scenes containing fragments of long-forgotten endeavors. Like an archaeologist, Ruwedel does his best to tread lightly so that others might have the experience of uncovering for themselves faint traces of that which precedes and may still survive us. If we look intently, we might be struck by how brief and small – though still consequential – is our time on earth. The ultimate beauty in these pictures may be the way they, like the writings of Carey Mc Williams, Joan Didion, Mike Davis, Jared Farmer etc., leave us with a deeper and less settled sense of our complex habitat. 

The exhibition has been co-curated with the artist and Sally Stein, independent scholar and art historian and is part of the PST ART: Art & Science Collide initiative.