Bow-Tie Teardrop (2003) takes the same Joshua Tree boulder field used across the Bow-Tie Landscapes series and folds it into perfect bilateral symmetry, the desert rock and scrub mirrored along its horizontal axis until the image reads as architectural rather than incidental. Overlaid on the landscape are two white teardrop silhouettes, positioned to point inward toward one another, their empty shapes acting as a kind of positive space cut directly into the mirrored terrain behind them.

The Bow-Tie Landscapes series, produced in 2003 as pigmented inkjet prints in an edition of thirty-five, applied this mirroring logic across different sites in the American West, taking a body of work Ruscha had spent decades building through direct, camera-based observation and running it instead through a process of digital transformation. Ruscha had photographed the American landscape with the even-handedness of a surveyor since the early 1960s, treating the camera as a neutral collecting device rather than a tool for personal expression, and the Bow-Tie works mark a genuine departure from that method, the first time he let a piece of software rather than a lens determine the final shape of an image. The teardrop motif itself carries none of the industrial connotations of the rivet or screwhead used elsewhere in the series, softening the group's mechanical vocabulary into something closer to weeping or falling, without ever settling on which reading is correct, consistent with the deliberately open, unresolved titling Ruscha applied across his whole career.

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