Author Description

Forty years after the publication of Edward Ruscha's "Various small fires" and forty-one years after "Twentysix gasoline stations", this work represents all the fire stations of the city of Montreal in operation on December 19, 2001. The artist worked from a list of addresses from 1999 and hence his photographic inventory turned out to be incomplete. Fire station no. 8 had moved, fire station no. 20 was in ruins and fire station no. 48 was closed for renovation. The pages for these stations were left blank. In December 2005 the artist looked for the missing fire stations. Postcards of two missing fire stations (no. 8 and no. 20) and a postcard with a picture of the artist with Ed Ruscha are inserted into to the book.