blog 12--roni horn

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Artist: Roni Horn

Bio: Born in New York in 1955, Roni Horn still lives and works in the city. She received a BFA from RISD and an MFA from Yale. Horn works through sculpture, works on paper, drawing, language, photography, site-specific installations, and books, though she describes drawing as the key aspect of her work, saying “drawing is about composing relationships.” Horn tries to create relationships between the viewer and her work by creating a new viewing path for each viewer through her installations; she does this by placing pieces on opposing walls in adjoining rooms through series of buildings, or by other ways of creating non-identical viewing experiences.

Image 1 - You Are The Weather; 1995; 64 C-print photographs and 36 gelatin-silver prints; 10 7/16 x 8 7/16 inches (each photograph).

Image 2 - Some Thames; 2000; Inkjet print on paper; 38 x 25 inches (each photograph).

Image 3 - Rings of Lispector (Agua Viva); 2004; Interconnecting rubber tiles; the entire floor.

Review: Roni Horn draws inspiration from her surroundings, namely Iceland, which she explains herself called back to over and over again. She has a fascination with nature and the relationship it holds, which is seen through many of her works, and a fascination particularly with water, which can be seen in her installation Some Thames. When speaking about Some Thames she mentions how it holds a high rate for capturing those who are suicidal, perhaps because of the darkness so intriguing and pulling behind its waves. She is fascinated by the variance in each shot because, while the river is the same, each moment and snapshot it’s changing.

Horn sets up her installations in a way in which each viewer is privy to a different journey through the pieces. By placing pieces on opposing walls and correlating pieces in separated rooms or even separate buildings, she creates a river for each viewer that won’t be the same any time. Much of Horn’s work is also language-based, but she explains that she sees text as visual just as much as any other visual language.

Horn states her feeling that “drawing is about composing relationships,” which, out of all I watched and read about and from her, I found the most beautiful. Her focus on and continuation to come back to relationships in her works is what I find most intriguing and wonderful about her work and her philosophy. She finds and seeks to present relationships in every manner: landscapes as relationships, locations as connections, time as performance, people as landscapes, people as repetition, and so on, always back to a core relationship and understanding between herself, her art, and the viewer.

I found Horn’s You Are The Weather installation particularly appealing because of this aspect. While creating this piece, Horn lived in Iceland in a lighthouse for several months, photographing the woman (who is the only subject of the installation). Horn gave the woman little guidance except for the use the water around the lighthouse as a setting for the photographs, and when interviewed, the woman commented that the relationship and trust built between Horn and herself played a strong role in the creation of the photographs, which show through clearly in the pieces.