Roni Horn's multi-media work interweaves the conceptual and abstract with the personal. Her art ranges from photographic installations to more conventionally conceived sculptural objects to drawings and books. She uses text, and has taken inspiration from the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens. In the catalogue essay for her 1993 exhibition Rare Spellings: Selected Drawings 1985-1992 at the Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland, critic Dieter Schwarz quoted from Stevens's poem 'An Ordinary Evening in New Haven1 as encapsulating Horn's work, a search for direct expression of things, undertaken despite the knowledge that reality is filtered through individual perception:
The poem of pure reality, untouched By trope or deviation, straight to the word, Straight to the transfixing object, to the object At the exactest point at which it is itself...
Horn trained at Yale University. Much of her art has been made in response to her experience of Iceland, including the series of volumes To Place, which she has been working on since 1990, and the photographic works You are the weather (1994-5) and Pi (1998). The title of Pi refers to the mathematical constant that is the ratio of the diameter to the circumference of a circle. For Horn, this is a metaphor for the Arctic Circle, which has no real existence outside maps. It only exists, as the constant does, to relate two parts, in this case to relate us to the planet we inhabit- Pi is made up of a mixture of images, photographs of the sea, of interiors, portraits, television soap stars and stuffed indigenous animals. The photographs circle the gallery, creating a panorama.
Symbolic of the cycles of nature and the rounds of daily life, Pi juxtaposes the real and the fake and plays on the complex relationship between nature and artifice. It also raises questions about our relationship with our environment: Horn is critical of man's abuse of the natural world.
|
