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ALSO KNOWN AS‌
At the heart of Roni Horn’s practice is the idea that our perception of the world is shaped by accumulated knowledge and memory. She creates works that invite close observation and a direct experience between her art and our own sense of discovery.
Many of Roni Horn’s works are composed as pairs, series, or with multiple sides, inviting us to notice subtle yet infinite differences between their parts. In a.k.a., paired portraits of the artist from her youth through adulthood highlight how one’s identity and its many facets—age, gender, moods, expressions—are never fixed and always shifting. We see this in Horn’s sculpture as well. Peer over the top of Pink Tons’s opaque cast sides into a seemingly liquid center that reacts to the atmospheric changes of Boston’s light and weather. This five-ton glass cube is at once imposing and inviting, brutish yet pink. For Horn, these apparent contradictions can coexist in the same body, whether a work of art or herself. “Integrating difference is the basis of identity, not the exclusion of it,” she writes. “You are this and this and that…” In the fourth floor West Gallery, you’ll see more of Horn’s works in solid glass, 24-carat gold, raw earth, pure pigment, photography, text, and sound. She moves seamlessly between materials in her exploration of identity, perception, and place. Front : Pink Tons, 2008. Installation view, Roni Horn aka Roni Horn, Collection Lambert, Avignon, 2009. Photo: A. Burger. Above : a.k.a. (detail), 2008-2009. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. © Roni Horn
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WHO ARE “YOU”?
Roni Horn’s work is an invitation to slow down and look. For the artist, looking at the object becomes as important as the object itself.
In You are the Weather, Roni Horn surrounds us with100 photographs of the same woman’s face as she rises from outdoor hot springs around Iceland. Her gaze is fixed on you, as her expression shifts from a calm look to a squinting glare. In this signature work, the photographs are always meticulously grouped, sequenced, and hung around the room like a horizon line. Is it our presence, when we enter, that becomes the unpredictable element reflected in her face? Who is the “You” of the title? With bird, Horn explores the idea that you can never really see the complete picture. Here, her subjects are faceless, with the title as our prompt for what we see. These highly detailed images are presented two by two—are they males and females of the same species? Are some pairs multiple views of the same bird? Horn’s pairing inevitably forces comparison, thus making us conscious of the very act of seeing and creating meaning. See birds from every angle with Scott V. Edwards, Harvard’s Curator of Ornithology, as he sheds light on the behavior and ecology of birds on Sunday, May 9, at 2 pm Front: You are the Weather, (detail),1994-95. Above: bird (detail), 1998/2008. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth. © Roni Horn
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IS THIS ME?
What is a portrait? We think of a photograph as a single, factual impression of a person, yet Roni Horn’s portraits are able to capture the continually evolving identity of her subjects.
For This is Me, This is You, Roni Horn installs on opposite walls candid shots of her young niece taken over two years. Each image corresponds to its “twin” in the same spot on the other grid, something you may notice after a few double-takes. The images suggest a range of entertaining characters and personalities, some shifting considerably in just the few seconds between exposures— from ecstatic to confused, bored to pleased, goofy to serious. Thanks to Horn’s strategic display, we begin to doubt our memory, because we can never see both images at once, or be exactly sure of the changes between them. The title of the work comes from a game Horn played with her niece, where they would assign a “me” and a “you” to random photographs they would mail to each other on postcards. Here, as in many of Horn’s works, the title prompts us to consider how we identify with images—what details define “me” or “you?” See and compare other portraits made over time. Visit the ICA Collection galleries and witness the transformation of Almerissa and Eygenia, two young women photographed by Rineke Dijkstra. Front and above: This is me, This is you (details), 1999-2000. Courtesy of Hauser & Wirth. © Roni Horn
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RONI AND EMILY
Roni Horn is deeply engaged with language and literature. Many of her works incorporate descriptive titles, evocative references, or direct quotations from well-known authors and poets, in this case, Emily Dickinson.
Roni Horn has long been fascinated by 19th-century poet Emily Dickinson, who lived in Amherst, Massachusetts, west of Boston. Despite spending much of her life as a recluse, Dickinson used language to defy the restrictions of place, society, and identity. Horn writes: “Dickinson stayed home, insistently. Locking herself into her upstairs room, she invented another form of travel and went places.” Language as a key to reinvention is an idea Horn continues to explore in her work. Since 1994, Horn has turned fragments of Dickinson’s writing into solid sculptures. Embedding cast plastic letters in aluminum rods, she creates works we can simultaneously see and read, from one side as an abstract pattern, and from the other as words. In the series Keys and Cues (see an example in the ICA Collection) Horn used single lines from Dickinson’s poems, while the series White Dickinson presents excerpts from the poet’s celebrated letters. These fragments prompt us to imagine or invent the rest— what images do the words conjure? Who was Emily Dickinson? Join us on Thursday, February 18, at 6:30 pm as poets reflect on her influence. On Sunday, April 11, at 2 pm, learn more about her from Cindy Dickinson of the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst. Learn new ways to approach Dickinson’s work in the classroom with our teacher workshops. Sign up at www.icaboston.org. Front: White Dickinson, ALWAYS BEGINS BY DEGREES , 2006/07. Courtesy of Hauser & Wirth.
© Roni Horn
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RONI HORN aka ICELAND
On her first visit to Iceland in 1975, Roni Horn recognized herself in this place of contradictions, “the land of fire and ice.” The mutability of its landscape and constantly changing weather reflected her interest in identities in flux. “Iceland is always becoming what it will be, and what it will be is not a fixed thing either,” writes the artist. “So here is Iceland: an act, not an object, a verb, never a noun.”
Roni Horn has traced Iceland’s continual shifts—volcanic, glacial, atmospheric—through countless photographs, maps, and drawings. The result is an ongoing series of books collectively titled To Place. Early drawings like Bluff Life are instinctive responses to Iceland’s landscape. Their raw, elemental forms, indexed on small note cards, resemble fossil remains or other geological deposits, fragments waiting to be deciphered. Thirty years later, Horn continues to visit Iceland regularly, explaining, “I come to this island to get at the very center of the world.” In a similar way, Horn identifies herself with Asphere, a solid form that rejects a sphere’s perfection with just the slightest distortion. The artist has called the stainless steel sculpture “an homage to androgyny,” alluding to a seemingly familiar form that is never quite what it first appears to be. Front : Asphere X, 1988/2001. Private collection. Above: Bluff Life, 1982. The Museum of Modern Art,
New York; purchased with funds given by Christiaan Braun. © Roni Horn
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THE SPACE BETWEEN
“A single object would not give me the kind of relationship I was interested in having with the viewer,” Roni Horn has said. She discovered early on that pairing images and objects intensifies our encounters with them. “The idea is to create a space in which the viewer would inhabit the work, or at least be part of it.” More than just a tactic, this is a keystone of Horn’s artistic vocabulary.
Roni Horn considers drawing fundamental to all of her work. To make the drawings shown in this exhibition, she draws two to four similar images with powdered pigment, charcoal, and varnish. She cuts these apart and splices them back together into one drawing by matching pairs of words or numbers written at the edges of each piece. These registration marks and smudges made by her hands are evidence of the process, which is as important to the finished piece as the final patterns. Creating these works is an open-ended practice of fragmenting and reconnecting images—a single large drawing may take up to four months. Like White Dickinson, the works are created by the intersection of language and form. The relationship between parts is also what animates Paired Gold Mats, for Ross and Felix. This work is dedicated to Horn's friends, artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres and his partner Ross Laycock, both of whom died of AIDS. Gonzalez-Torres described the significance of the work’s parts: “Two, a number of companionship, of doubled pleasure, a pair, a couple, one on top of the other. Mirroring and emanating light.” Here, the space between the gold sheets glows with an energy that would never exist without their delicate pairing. Front : Must 7, 1985. The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection Gift. Above : Paired Gold Mats, for Ross and Felix, 1994-95. The Art Institute of
Chicago, gift of Muriel Kallis Newman in honor of James Cuno. © Roni Horn
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YOU ARE THE WATER
“You cannot step into the same river twice.” —Heraclitus Water, an important subject for Horn, dominates the landscape of her second home, Iceland, where it exists in every state, from thunderous waterfalls to steaming geothermal pools to frozen glaciers. It is a perfect metaphor for the artist’s exploration of identity as fundamentally fluid and changing.
Roni Horn is attracted to elemental materials whose qualities are fleeting: flowing water, powdered pigment, loose earth, reflective gold, transparent glass, pure light, and poetic language. In Still Water (The River Thames, for Example), 15 photographs flow around this room, just feet from the water of Boston Harbor. The images reveal the countless variations of the river's surface that can only be stilled through photography—it can look quiet or disturbed, fresh or murky. Floating across the images are footnotes with corresponding texts that explore the river's unseen depths and elusive nature. The smooth surfaces of Horn’s glass sculptures, which variously reflect and filter light, are similarly ambiguous. Aretha, made of bold red optical glass, appears both solid and liquid, while its lively play of light seems at odds with its immobility at 1,200 pounds. Opposite of White, v. 1 (Large) and Opposite of White, v. 2 (Large) both accurately embody their titles, but in contrary ways—one is colorless, the other densely black. Creating works that are both highly polished and reflective, rough and opaque all at the same time, Horn uses minimal forms to raise complex questions about what defines something (or someone) as one thing or another. Front: Still Water (The River Thames, for Example), 1999. Tate, London; presented by the American Fund for the Tate Gallery, courtesy of the American Acquisitions Committee 2005, accessioned 2008. Above: Untitled (Aretha), 2002-04. Museum of Modern Art, New York; fractional and promised gift of Kathy and Richard S. Fuld Jr., 2006. © Roni Horn
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