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Indepth Arts News:
"Two Part Exhibition by Roni Horn"
2001-10-17 until 2002-02-17
Dia Center for the Arts
New York, NY,
USA
A two-part exhibition of works by Roni Horn will open at Dia
Center for the Arts on October 17, 2001. Each part will feature
three series of photographically based works, together with the
new sculpture Untitled (Yes) (2001), all of which continue
Horn's longstanding interest in questions of difference and
identity.
Sited in two rooms, the pair of elements that comprise
Untitled (Yes), 2001, activates memory to explore notions of
difference and sameness. A glass block of exceptional clarity
renders almost paradoxical the idea of physical transparency,
while its opaque counterpart becomes equally confounding: a
black mirror mutates all reflection into a spectral negative of
itself. Contending modalities of phenomena and appearance also
subtend Clowd and Cloun (Gray) (2001), a series of
alternating images of these two motifs. If mutability of
appearance is integral to the phenomenon of the cloud--since
dissolution or erasure is inevitable--the converse is proposed
for the clown. The clown is a constant, a symbolic form whose
identity is rooted in a conventionally defined appearance, one
which occludes the specifics of the persona--the player--who
temporarily assumes that guise.
Taken with a point-and-shoot camera, the panoply of images of a
young girl that make up This Is Me, This Is You (2000) is
presented in two paired groups located on opposite walls of the
gallery. Minute differences between individual pairs of images
counterpoints vast shifts in mood, dress, and expression.
Unstable and irresolvable, the relation of appearance to
identity-indeed, the very nature of identity-is here revealed
as dependent on a fundamental but mutable distinction,
intimated in a child's explanatory proposition: this is me,
this is you. The earliest body of work to be included in the
exhibition, Some Thames (2000), like This Is Me, This Is
You, takes up the idea of the multitude in one. It further
develops Horn's ongoing fascination with the amorphous,
essential, elusive, but familiar, nature of water, a
fascination that also informs Saying Water (2001), a related
audio CD produced specially for this show.
In Part II of the exhibition, a second variant of the Clowd and
Cloun series will be shown, and Some Thames will be replaced
with a new photographic work, Becoming a Landscape (2001).
Roni Horn
Since the 1970s, Horn, who was born in 1955, has produced work
in a variety of mediums, including sculpture, photography,
drawing, essays, and books. She has had solo exhibitions at the
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2000); Musée d'Art
Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1999); De Pont Foundation for
Contemporary Art, Tilburg, the Netherlands (1998; 1994); Wexner
Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (1996); Kunsthalle Basel
(1995); Baltimore Museum of Art (1994); Kunstmuseum Basel
(1997; 1995); New Museum for Living Art, Reykjavik (1992);
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1990), and elsewhere.
She has also exhibited at the Venice Biennale (1997); Documenta
IX (1992), and the 1991 Whitney Biennial. Since 1989, Horn's
Things That Happen Again (1986) has been on long-term
exhibition at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. She is a
participant in the Thames and Hudson Rivers Project, sponsored
by Minetta Brook (New York) and the Public Art Development
Trust (London).
Roni Horn received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design
and an MFA from Yale University. She teaches at the Columbia
University School of the Arts and lives and works in New York
City.
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