On Horsepower

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Driving south from Las Vegas, New Mexico toward Anton Chico on Highway 84, there is a mesa where the land suddenly opens so completely that distance stops behaving like measurement altogether. You can see for something like sixty miles from atop, juniper and sagebrush spreading across the ground in muted green clusters interrupted occasionally by a herd of cattle, a wire fence, a pickup truck crossing the ranch slowly enough that it appears suspended inside the landscape rather than passing through it. A gate swinging open somewhere in the distance. Dust curling in thin tendrils up the side of a dry arroyo. Sunlight sliding out from behind a cloudbank and spreading across sandstone faces so gradually that by late afternoon the entire mesa has changed color. After enough time out there, it becomes difficult to tell what is actually moving and what is simply taking place very far away.

Maybe that is part of why the old Wile E. Coyote cartoons never felt especially exaggerated to me growing up. The body runs beyond the edge of the cliff and hangs there for several impossible seconds before gravity finally intervenes. Then the delayed “poof!” of dust from somewhere deep below after the body itself has disappeared from view.

3:44 p.m. one autumn afternoon, trying to make it to the post office before the doors locked at four, I saw a dark oil stain spread across the highway. I slowed without really deciding to, and only then did it separate into hundreds of tarantulas moving south toward Mexico for mating season. I stayed in the Jeep at first, engine running, watching them pass through heat shimmer in uneven intervals, small bodies stopping and continuing as if the road itself couldn’t fully settle on a rhythm. They were much smaller than I had imagined as a kid in the Midwest watching Arachnophobia, shy even, though together they resembled a single shifting surface, something between the sheen of polyester shag carpet and mirage crossing low over asphalt. Eventually I stepped out beside the road while the wind threaded through the chamisa and the spiders continued without urgency, indifferent to highways, timing, their brief appearance from far away as liquid.

In Helsinki, not long after moving, I ended up at Crazy Horse in Malmi one Thursday evening following a gallery opening at SIC, still not entirely used to darkness arriving mid-afternoon. Beneath flickering red neon and a painted horse rearing permanently above the bar, somebody near the entrance drifted steadily through karaoke several beats behind the screen. I took a photo. At some point I recorded myself singing Paula Cole’s “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?” and sent it back to friends in the States, who responded almost immediately, the delay between us collapsing into a shared amusement that I still couldn’t entirely locate while standing there with phone in one hand and mic in the other. Finnish suburbia, American roadside mythology, country radio, karaoke, all of it occupying the same atmosphere without losing too much confidence in itself along the way.

I kept thinking about that strange cultural backflow a few months later while watching Aki Kaurismäki’s Leningrad Cowboys Go America for the first time at AJ and Kristoffer’s apartment in Roihuvuori after sauna, all sharp boots, expressionless highways, pompadours moving “westward” through an America built partly from diners, gas stations, and long empty roads. Their version of the Southwest never quite made it where you’d expect. It drops downward instead, toward the Gulf and the Deep South, though somehow the mistake still feels accurate.

Had they passed through the Southwest, maybe Finland would have inherited a different image of the place than Walter White’s Albuquerque. Instead the real Albuquerque kept expanding outward to meet its fictional one. Streaming studios pushed farther into the desert, new sound stages rose against horizon lines that had already spent decades standing in for the Southwest. A friend of mine worked on some of those productions.

Years earlier, No Country for Old Men was shot not far from me in Las Vegas, inside the historic Plaza Hotel and along streets where the faded drugstores and textile shops seem less preserved than simply left alone long enough to become themselves again. Later came the remake of The Magnificent Seven, more horses crossing the same terrain while pickup trucks, generators, trailers, and camera rigs waited farther back along the shoulder before sunrise.

The horse may be one of the most overworked images in American visual culture, though it never seems to tire of the arrangement. Not really the animal itself, but the image of it. A horse standing against a horizon line can carry Marlboro light in one direction and casino carpet in another without needing to change posture.

On a long phone call with a friend nine time zones away, sometime after my father was diagnosed and I was feeling homesick, I found myself talking about things I missed from the United States that he liked. Our road trip mix. Watching the Lonesome Dove series on the downstairs TV. Long drives through western landscapes taken in silence, roadside attractions of the world's largest something just beyond the next exit, vacations we went on as a family. One time we even went through New Mexico. I had almost believed it. I still wanted to. This was not a simple time to be feeling fond of the place.

The series started, I think, on that call. Through his eyes it had always been something simpler — the open road, the horizon, a version of the country that offered itself as promise.

I didn’t grow up in New Mexico, though after living and working there for more than a decade, particular details attached themselves to me so thoroughly that they now feel difficult to separate from older inherited versions of the landscape circulating long before I arrived. Ranch trucks left in fields long enough that sun and dust had nearly equal say in their final appearance. Entire afternoons disappearing while weather reorganized the same stretch of highway. Sometimes I cannot tell whether I miss the place itself or the accumulated texture surrounding it, something assembled through work, repetition, cinema, memory, boredom, projection, loneliness, and an enormous amount of time spent driving alone through the high desert. By then the geography already existed partly as image anyway.

Thunder and Lightning in Her Thighs, 2026. Installation view, Pitted Dates, Helsinki.
Photograph by Sakari Tervo.

The works in Horsepower layer photographs I had taken with stock images gathered from commercial archives: horses posed in impossible light, vehicles photographed for marketing campaigns, skies adjusted toward a kind of permanent golden hour. I was looking, I think, for something that felt true through accumulation rather than accuracy. Gohar Martirosyan, an Armenian filmmaker I met during a residency in Trier, sent me a single image from Eadweard Muybridge’s horse studies from the 1870s in our group chat called “residency hoes.” Looking at them again online, I became less interested in early cinema than in how movement gets assembled frame by frame. The horse running in the image hovers between positions, the body broken across the sequence, stretched thinly across time rather than moving through it.

When I first saw George Stubbs' Whistlejacket in the National Portrait Gallery in London, the horse felt almost unmoored, lifting itself against an empty field without landscape or horizon to hold it in place. My friend Valter Tornberg, who works mostly with poetics, had written about the painting in an essay on italics and leaning — he describes leaning as a body suspended in mid-fall, forms depending on supports outside themselves in order to remain upright. The horse and the sentence share the same predicament. Both caught mid-gesture, both needing something outside the frame to resolve.

In a museum gift shop nearby, thumbing through catalogues, I came across Sonia Boyce's collage works, different bodies, textures, and visual histories occupying the same surface without cancelling one another out, each element still dependent on the others to hold its shape. She had been close to me while assembling these pieces without my having named it until then.

Part of the series came from trying to understand that feeling of attachment to a place whose imagery has already been massively circulated, simplified, sold back, and exported. I wonder whether it is possible to miss something honestly once it has become entangled with so many layers of projection. Is there any meaningful distinction left between the two?

I suppose I was never trying to separate the landscape from its reproductions in this series. They feel thoroughly braided together. The horse running through the frame may be descended from European breeds reintroduced to North America centuries ago, though by now the image of the horse arrives already carrying Western expansion, extraction, tourism, freedom myths. Somewhere nearby sits the truck, the highway, the long straight road disappearing toward the state line. After a while even the promise attached to movement starts feeling inherited.

And still, certain details won’t leave me alone. The sound of a swooping nighthawk or the smell of white sage after a downpour somewhere outside Santa Rosa. Wind snapping against the plastic bikini top of my Jeep Wrangler driving north on weekends. A tan leather Stetson leading me down a ski slope. The deep blue of New Mexico just before dark, when light stretches long enough across the horizon that the landscape appears briefly held in place before night finally arrives.

I wanted to believe it all.

Highway Symphony (I–III, from Horsepower), 2026. Installation view, Galleria Sculptor, Helsinki.
Photograph by Aukusti Heinonen.

© 2026 Kate Ruck