Roni Horn

The notions of “sameness” and “difference” are a continuous source of inspiration to the work of Roni Horn. For her second exhibition in the gallery, Roni Horn has selected a series of recent works, all of which address these two issues.

Clowd & Clown (2001) comprises a series of 32 photographs with alternating images of clouds and clowns. At the basis of this work, lies the reflection about the contending motifs of phenomena and appearance.
“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.”

For This Is Me, This Is You (2000) has taken a panoply of photographs of a young girl. The work is presented in 2 groups of 48 paired photographs and is located in separate rooms. 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.”

Together with the photographically based works, Roni Horn is showing the sculpture Twilight (1991), an aluminium rod with 49 MILES cast into it in white lettering. “It was inspired by an experience I had as a child”, says Roni Horn. “I distinctly remember hearing a radio DJ introducing Thelonious Monk’s Crépuscule with Nellie, and I’ve always felt that crépuscule – which means twilight – was a word whose beauty approached that of its meaning – its sound alone suggests the nebulous and the immeasurable. Twenty years later I was reading a science article and I discovered that twilight has a limit, which is forty-nine miles. From this came the work, an ultra-mechanical,
ultra-quantitative object, but in its presence you witness only the pathos of the measurable.” (Roni Horn, Phaidon Press, London, 2000, p. 127-128)

Clowd & Clown and This Is Me, This Is You are also included in Roni Horn’s current solo exhibition Blah,Blah, Blah,… at the DIA Center for the Arts in New York.