Sign in Rain Storm (2021) is the most legible and the most literal of the three Sign works. A SEA LEVEL marker — outline capitals on a rectangular board, mounted on a single post — stands in the open while blue rain falls across everything, scattered drops and elongated marks distributed across the white ground with the evenness of actual precipitation. The sign is clear. The rain is everywhere. The combination is almost too straightforward to be accidental.

SEA LEVEL is a measurement, a fixed point from which all other elevations are calculated — the baseline against which the land is understood to exist at whatever height it does. As a sign it is less common than CITY LIMITS or STATE LINE, the other markers in the series, and more abstract: it does not indicate where a jurisdiction begins, but where the water is. In 2021, that phrase carries a weight it would not have carried when Ruscha first began cataloguing American roadside signage in the 1960s. A sign telling you where sea level is, standing in the rain, is not a neutral object.

Ruscha does not editoralise. The Sign series applies the same matter-of-fact treatment to CITY LIMITS, STATE LINE, and SEA LEVEL, giving each phrase the same outlined lettering, the same single post, the same atmospheric assault. The series began with the observation that these signs are everywhere in the American landscape, marking boundaries and measurements that most people drive past without reading. By the third work in the group, the choice of phrase has done something the earlier two did not quite do: it has made the weather relevant to the text in a way that is impossible to ignore, and done so without comment.

For more information or to buy Sign in Rain Storm by Ed Ruscha, contact our specialists using the enquiry button above.

View Ed Ruscha original art for sale, or learn how to sell Ed Ruscha artwork.