UNION PACIFIC | PHILIP DENKER | ANGELA KALLUS | BRIAN PORRAY | DAVID RYAN | 19 NOVEMBER 2016 – 02 JANUARY 2017

For a while I have wanted to do something “about” the space of the west – big skies, the endless horizon, vanishing points – but I hadn’t really given it much serious thought. In January of this year, after a brief trip to New Mexico, I knew all at once what it should be – a four-person show with the work of Philip Denker, David Ryan, Brian Porray, and myself. It would be a landscape show, the way I saw it – and not just the external landscape you see outside your eyes – but the infinite noisy space that opens inside your head, too. I should now qualify that – the noise inside my head. I can’t assume all heads are as undisciplined as mine. This is something I have been talking about with David Ryan ever since – how the elegance and rigor of his work counters the static between his ears. About the difference between formal discipline and chaotic impulses. About looking for
structure, and then finding it everywhere. And about the extra information, the the glitches. The “obscene supplement” (as it were.)

Why Union Pacific? Philip is from Kansas City, both David and I are from Texas, and Brian is from Las Vegas. Brian now lives in LA, David lives in Vegas, Philip was in New Mexico last year but lives in Texas, now. All four of us met in Vegas, and the vast emptiness of the desert landscape is visually present here, in very different ways, but here nonetheless. I wanted a name that would suggest all of this like a rune, like a meme: emptiness, motion, flatness, endless horizons, collapsing of space, points on a map, lines on a graph, speed, noise, interference, focus – and I wanted a train line that ran through Kansas City, Fort Worth, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles. Philip Denker took this panorama from the roof tower at the Roswell artist’s residency in May 2016 – both the moon and the sun are visible, a noisy, flashy sunset on the right side, a perfectly round, still, full moon on the left, impossibly bent and curved space, flattening into a believable lie – the horizon line, with vanishing points.

-Angela Kallus, 2016