This single-work presentation inaugurates the fourth season of programming at The Ranch. The sculptural installation Deep Station (1981–1985) is a physical and sonic recreation of an unpeopled and nocturnal subway station. The show 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.
The last in a series of New York City subway stations began in 1973, Deep Station also references the Roman Forum. Its intricate arrangement of platform, track, girders, I-beams, and vaulting arches creates the illusion of far-reaching underground passages that evoke psychological drama. “For me,” says the artist, “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’… I think of the track area as a kind of subterranean river and the platform as an ancient city on the banks of that river. Processes begun deep underground will be felt on the surface later, like shifting tectonic plates. In my metaphor, this represents a shift in consciousness.”
