In Sandow Birk's new series of paintings and prints, the artist explores the myth of the Wild West and the reality of modern-day California. Birk portrays the state's correctional facilities in the style of great 19th-century illustrators, placing the prisons in romantic landscapes and creating a dialogue between an imagined idyllic past and an increasingly constricted present.

Last Gasp,U.S.: Oct 01, 2004.
ISBN: 9780867195347. pp.
Paperback. Very good.