Hamptons, New York
Donna Dennis
Deep Station
The RanchThe Ranch is pleased to present Donna Dennis: Deep Station, a single-work exhibition of the artist's immersive sculpture Deep Station (1981-1985) in The Ranch's West Barn Gallery. The exhibition presents the physical and sonic recreation of an unpeopled and nocturnal New York subway station. The show inaugurates The Ranch’s fourth season of summer programming. It continues the pivotal work’s extensive display between 1985 and 1998 when it was exhibited at numerous museums, including the Brooklyn Museum in 1987. This presentation marks the work’s public reemergence since it was last on view at the Indianapolis Museum of Art in 1998. As Dennis explains: “For me the subway is a metaphorical kind of space having to do with a number of aspects of human experience and of course the subconscious. Deep Station is meant to be the subway station at the “bottom of the world,” as far down as you can get, hence all the columns and rivets holding up enormous weight. I think of the track area as a kind of subterranean river and the platform as a kind of ancient city on the banks of that river.” Dennis is one of a small group of groundbreaking women—including Alice Aycock, Jackie Ferrara and Mary Miss—who pushed sculpture toward the domain of architecture in the early 1970s. Deborah Everett writes in Sculpture Magazine “When Donna Dennis created her earnest, plain-spoken Tourist Cabins at the outset of her career, they had the impact of cultural icons.” Drawing from overlooked fragments of rural and urban vernacular American architecture, her sculptures—tourist cabins, hotels, subway stations, roller coasters—have represented stopping places on the journey through life. Dennis has received solo exhibitions at The Brooklyn Museum, the Neuberger Museum, the Sculpture Center, and Holly Solomon Gallery, among others. Her work has also appeared in group exhibitions including the Venice Biennale, the Whitney Biennial, the National Academy Museum, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Walker Art Center, MoMA P.S. 1, Tate Gallery, ICA London, and Ludwig Forum fur Internationale Kunst, among others.