After traveling to London and New York City, the exhibit "Roni Horn aka Roni Horn" has finally made its way to the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA). The show has been slightly altered in each city in order to best inhabit its current space, leading Horn's works to be viewed differently as they respond to the area around them. This change is particularly relevant in an exhibition such as this because Horn's show is predominantly based on ideas of shifting identities and memories surrounding the artist's experience with the world around her.
Horn was born in 1955 and studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she obtained her undergraduate degree. She then traveled to Iceland to create a number of works that led to her living alone in an old lighthouse on the coast. This country is of particular importance to her art because she formed such a deep connection with its cold and isolated, yet beautiful, nature. Horn, who is openly gay, experiments with an art that is autobiographical, yet simultaneously encompasses more universal ideals in its conceptual format.
Horn's artwork is very at home in the ICA because of the museum's location and architectural design. Her show is significantly more powerful in this museum than it was at the Whitney Museum of American Art because many of Horn's works demand the luminous quality of natural light to impart their full effect on the viewer.
From the moment one enters the lobby of the ICA, one is immediately confronted with "Pink Tons," a glass sculpture in the shape of an enormous cube. This piece, like a number of Horn's works throughout the exhibit, is literally illuminated by the sunlight that streams in through the ICA's expansive glass windows. It would not be nearly as powerful in an artificially lit gallery because of its entrancing pink transparency, which almost appears liquid when the bright light shines on it.
Despite the importance of sculpture in Horn's oeuvre, her body of work covers much more than this medium of artistic presentation. Much of her art in this retrospective exhibition is composed of photographs organized into discreet pairs and other types of thematic groupings, giving them an almost architectural presence. One particular instance of this technique is discernable in her iconic work "You are the Weather," a series of 100 photographs of the same female model. Taken from a very close perspective, these images allow viewers to see little more than the figure's face and her immediate surroundings.
These photographs, some of which are black and white, while others feature saturated pigments, are organized in an eye−level, horizontal band that encircles the entire room, creating the effect of a horizon line. The images are further divided into distinct sets that depict the woman's face in various bodies of water, ranging from indoor pools to natural Icelandic hot springs. The range of atmospheric conditions featured seems to refer back to the title of the work by suggesting different types of weather, as well as relating the figure's changing expressions to the state of nature.
"You are the Weather" makes viewers question the identity of its subject, what her relationship may have been to the artist and how an individual person may be able to represent something as grand as the weather, while leaving everything unanswered.
Horn carries this ambiguous aspect of her art into other works such as "Bird," a work that features pairs of photographs depicting the backs of birds' heads, which appear almost abstract due to their stark and simplistic qualities. By refusing to reveal the birds' faces, yet creating such explicit relationships between the pairings, Horn demands that her viewers look closely at the works in order to form their own opinions about their significance. This makes viewer interaction with Horn's work an integral part of every single work's meaning and importance.
Meaning is something that is generally associated with words, thus revealing another definitive part of Horn's collection. In a film that is continually looped at the ICA, Horn describes this aspect of her work by saying, "I move through language to arrive at the visual." In fact, written words are present in a number of her works at the ICA. On display is a series of Horn's large−scale drawings, which are actually collages created by cutting up smaller drawings and then piecing them back together. This act of careful deconstruction and reconstruction is achieved through the use of words as markers to help fit the puzzle pieces of the drawing back together.
By writing these small key words on various edges of the parts, Horn is able to apply method to her madness even though the words seem to have no obvious meaning themselves. This confusing, yet precise way of working creates a current that runs through all of Horn's conceptually stimulating pieces, which are so beautifully displayed in the ICA's curatorial masterpiece.
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Roni Horn aka Roni Horn
At the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, through June 13
100 Northern Avenue, Boston
617-478-3100
