Ham­mer Gallery’s head cura­tor, Dou­glas Fogle, has put together an exhi­bi­tion fea­tur­ing a pair of men who have had some seri­ous impact on doc­u­ment­ing America’s cul­tural land­scape over the years. In Ed Ruscha’s large can­vas acrylic paint­ings, he takes bite-​size chunks from Kerouac’s On The Road and places them over nature back­drops. As a writer I’m always inter­ested in what images can do for the words, whether the pure grit of fic­tion can be enhanced at all with­out los­ing some­thing. But as small clips, these words grow to rep­re­sent some­thing larger than them­selves, some­thing iconic, with that moun­tain peak below, and loom larger even than from their con­text in Kerouac’s famed scroll. A quote of epic pro­por­tion. At first I didn’t love how the white “prob­a­bly” blends in with the snow, but on sec­ond glance I liked it. The barely there ‘prob­a­bly’ gives a fluc­tu­a­tion to the end of the sen­tence, shift­ing it to “one that means heaven.”

The spac­ing between the words and the way in which they float seems to iso­late the phrase in such a way that a sin­gu­lar impact is cre­ated. The sense that Kerouac’s words are here, on a large can­vas hung on a wall, gives them a tan­gi­ble per­ma­nence that is hard to gain from read­ing them on a page amid their fel­low sen­tences. And the sur­real, almost alien-​like shadow on the moun­tain below makes me think of the peaks with their great mys­tics perch­ing, small men sweat­ing up moun­tains for a grain of advice from an illu­mi­nated sage, the immea­sur­able sky of an envi­ron­ment that is not too shabby despite man’s messy habitation.

Mixed Greens has a show up right now called Cabin Fever that has some work sim­i­lar to Ruscha’s, and I think it would be inter­est­ing to look at them side by side. These are small laser print and spray paint pieces by Tyler Matthew Oyer that are mounted on alu­minum. There is more going on in these and less neg­a­tive space. The scale and beauty of the desert land­scapes and hills together with the gold word­ing and portal-​like door­way fram­ing a painted peak, when com­bined with names of Broad­way musi­cals, cre­ate a tem­po­rary vision of a place and an era, much like Ed Ruscha’s paint­ings do for Kerouac’s words. These remind me of the black and white of old tele­vi­sion, and of alien sight­ings and spec­ta­cle. Where mys­tics would be climb­ing Ruscha’s hills for wise words, men climb­ing these desert hunks of rock could be look­ing for hints of some­thing beyond what mankind has found before, for extrater­res­tri­als or door­ways into other worlds. Happy Monday.