In the 1960s, Ed Ruscha began playing with language, finding strangeness in the most ordinary words. Paired with different images, he noticed, their meaning could change greatly. For instance, in It’s It (2024) he attempted to explain what “It’s” is, only to introduce a complication by following the three letters with another pronoun. Among Ruscha’s many experiments, he sometimes painted directly on raw linen, though these works have never been the focus of an exhibition since he began making them in the early 1990s. This show changes that, filling a gallery with white words on beige canvases, their spots of color, diagonals, and shadows bringing them to life the Ruscha way. —Jeanne Malle