The Ranch is happy to announce an exhibition of the American sculptor Donna Dennis, the single-work presentation inaugurating the fourth season of programming at The Ranch. The sculptural set up, Deep Station (1981–1985), is a bodily and sonic recreation of an unpeopled and nocturnal subway station. The present continues the pivotal work’s intensive show between 1985 and 1998 when it was exhibited at quite a few museums, together with the Brooklyn Museum in 1987. This presentation marks the work’s public reemergence because it was final on view on the Indianapolis Museum of Artwork in 1998.
The final in a sequence of New York Metropolis subway stations started in 1973, Deep Station additionally references the Roman Discussion board. Its intricate association of platform, monitor, girders, I-beams, and vaulting arches creates the phantasm of far-reaching underground passages that evoke psychological drama. “For me,” says the artist, “the subway is a metaphorical form of house having to do with numerous points of human expertise and naturally the unconscious. Deep Station is supposed to be the subway station on the ‘backside of the world’… I consider the monitor space as a form of subterranean river and the platform as an historical metropolis on the banks of that river. Processes begun deep underground can be felt on the floor later, like shifting tectonic plates. In my metaphor, this represents a shift in consciousness.”
Dennis started exploring structure’s metaphorical potentialities in the course of the Seventies, spurred on by the teachings and legacies of the Girls’s Motion. Her early works, false entrance inns and subway stations, have been compressed enclosures that subliminally mirrored her personal interiority. As her investigations expanded, the artist started imbuing American vernacular structure with epic scale. Deep Station is the most important and most advanced of her subway stations. The work arrives on the Ranch on a wave of resurgent curiosity within the artist, who was not too long ago hailed by The New York Instances as a godmother of set up artwork.
Donna Dennis’s immersive installations have been exhibited in outstanding museums and world exhibitions, together with the Brooklyn Museum, the Neuberger Museum, the Sculpture Heart, the Venice Biennale, the Whitney Biennial, the Nationwide Academy Museum, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Walker Artwork Heart, MoMA PS1, Tate Gallery, ICA London, and the Ludwig Discussion board for Worldwide Artwork. Her work is held in quite a few private and non-private collections. She’s the topic of a career-surveying monograph, Donna Dennis: Poet in Three Dimensions (The Monacelli Press, 2023) and writer of Writing Towards Daybreak: Chosen Journals 1969–1982 (Bamberger Books, 2024). She lives and works in Germantown, New York.
