Among the Mountain Series lithographs, Periods (2013) takes the most direct approach to the question of time. Five abbreviated units cascade down the right side of the image — SECS. small at the top, then HRS., WKS., MOS., and finally YRS. filling nearly a quarter of the picture plane at the bottom — each one larger than the last, the typography growing as the units of measurement expand. Behind them, a dramatic alpine landscape: vivid blue mountains, a deep cobalt lake, snow-capped peaks against a pale turquoise sky, the whole scene rendered with the saturated intensity of a travel poster or a geological survey illustration.

The typographic logic is scale as duration. SECS. is tiny because seconds pass before you can register them; YRS. is enormous because years accumulate into the kind of weight that reshapes a life or a landscape. Ruscha had always been drawn to systems — the sequential logic of his artist books, the catalogue approach of Twentysix Gasoline Stations, the serial thinking that ran through everything from the Standard Station prints to the Rubber Bands states — and Periods applies that systematic thinking to time itself, rendering the entire span of human temporal experience as five abbreviations on a mountain.

The mountain is the counter-argument. Geology operates on a scale that makes YRS. look as small as SECS., the formations behind the text having taken millions of years to arrive at their current configuration. The human system of measurement, so confidently scaled across the image, is placed against a subject that makes the largest unit in the sequence — years — appear as negligible as the smallest. The periods after each abbreviation, which give the print its title, are doing quiet work: each full stop closes a unit of time with the finality of a sentence ending, the punctuation asserting completion in a landscape that has no interest in conclusions.

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