Horses rarely appear without carrying something else. The image arrives already loaded, moving across histories from land into representation, from animal into symbol. It has proven durable, tied to motion and to a particular idea of freedom that travels with it, even as the conditions that produced it shift.

In the American West, the horse became central to a mythology of openness and self-determination, a figure capable of holding contradiction while obscuring the structures beneath it. That mythology did not remain local. It circulated through film, advertising, and repetition, absorbed at a distance as stories we inherit, softening histories more complex than the images allow, until it began to feel ambient rather than constructed.

These images belong to a larger construction of the West, encountered as much through image as through place. For many, it is learned before it is lived. What remains is less a location than something that continues to surface, shaping how landscape is read and how movement is imagined. To grow up within that system is to carry it, even when moving elsewhere.

In the works of hevoset karkaa, the image returns under pressure. Horses run, while another form begins to follow. The two overlap, one trailing the other, closing in without fully arriving. The language of freedom persists, but its terms have already been reconfigured elsewhere

The gesture borrows from a familiar cartoon logic, where pursuit continues regardless of outcome, and where the distance between intention and result never quite resolves. Recognition arrives late, if at all, and the structure remains intact.

The exhibition includes a commissioned companion text by Kylee Aragon Wallis, a New Mexico-born writer, curator and scholar based in London. Her writing reflects on distance and memory, and on how the American Southwest is held between lived histories and projected imaginaries. Ruck and Aragon Wallis met in Santa Fe in 2021, and this project has been supported by Arts Promotion Centre Finland.

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Kate Ruck lives and works in Helsinki, Finland, with close ties to Las Vegas, New Mexico. She spent over a decade working in artists’ studios in New York and New Mexico as a studio and project manager, contributing to large-scale sculptural and land-based works before establishing her own practice. Her work takes shape through site-responsive installations grounded in the material conditions of a place, considering how traditions and shared histories persist through fragmentation and change, and how forms of making can honor what they inherit rather than claim possession over it. Many projects begin in collaboration, often unfolding outside conventional gallery spaces.

Ruck’s work has been presented across institutional and independent contexts in Finland and internationally. She holds an MFA in Sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki (FI), and was part of the inaugural cohort of the Centre for Nordic Otherwise (DK). She has been an artist-in-residence at Factum Arte in Madrid (ES), and her work has been supported by Arts Promotion Centre Finland, the Kone Foundation and the Finnish Cultural Foundation. In 2026, she will undertake a five-month residency at MORPHO in Antwerp (BE).

With thanks to Andreas Behn-Eschenburg, Marissa Fassano, Valpuri Remling, Inkeri Virtanen, and Viktor Toikkanen.

Hevoset karkaa — literally “the horses are escaping” or “fleeing” — appears here as “the horses are fleeting.” In Finnish, it is also an idiom referring to a small exposure, like when your fly is down. I first heard it in a bar in Helsinki, somewhere between languages.