Famous for combining language and Pop imagery in wry commentaries on American life, Ed Ruscha is a pioneer who's oeuvre forever changed the way artists incorporate language in their work. One of many paintings he created using the final frame of a movie reel as a motif, this painting captures a moment frozen in time. The titular phrase is fractured and split between the top and bottom of the picture plane, as if the film has stuttered in the projector. This “out-of-sync mode,” as Ruscha termed it, speaks to a feeling of not belonging in the present moment. The Gothic text, monochrome palette and painted imperfections in the image that evoke tiny scratches and dust motes, all refer to an earlier -- perhaps romanticized -- time.

A long-term resident of Los Angeles, the epicenter of the film world, Ruscha is especially drawn to this medium as a symbol of a particular moment in American culture. Technically, he achieves a projected, film-like quality by spray-painting the linen canvas with an airbrush—a technique he’s employed from the 1980s on. This “strokeless painting” as he called it, refers to Pop Art, particularly the silk-screened works of Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns, as well as the smooth, velvety quality of film projected onto the screen. By painting on un-primed linen with the weave of the textile visible, he's calling attention to the artifice of image-making — the fact that this is a painting, not a film, which is, in turn, not reality, but an artificially constructed representation of its subject.
The work also falls into the historic genre of momento mori. In his characteristically dead-pan way, Ruscha asks us to consider the place of American culture as we wait for the film to flicker back into life, then slowly fade to black.