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...Abstract Expressionists claimed the canvas as a physical embodiment of their psyche and the Minimalists examined the relationship between the viewer and object. Roni Horn, in the three decades of work currently being shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA), attempts to reconcile the two. Horn, a Rhode Island School of Design and Yale University alumna, has been working as a visual artist since the 1970s, garnering critical acclaim, awards, and one-person exhibits at major institutions. Despite the immense body of work, range of time, and differing mediums that the mid-career retrospective includes, “Roni...
...Still Water (The River Thames, for Example),” the architectural space best enhances Horn’s work. Fifteen close-up color photographs of water encircle the room, and the ICA supplies a sixteenth image with its floor to ceiling view of the harbor. While this could be construed as distracting in some cases, this intrusion of the gallery space prods the viewer to notice the work’s dualities of motion and stillness, change and permanence, and similarity and difference in relation to the Boston Harbor...
...Working out of the tradition of Minimalism, Horn’s work has traces of the movement—seriality, utilitarian materials, and austere simplicity and beauty. Perhaps some of the most Minimalist pieces in the exhibit, collectively called “White Dickinson,” six bars of cast aluminum and white plastic stand propped in a room evenly spaced from each other. Despite the solidity of the bars, this propping invokes fragility and impermanence, producing an enigma...
Like a piece by influential Minimalist Donald Judd, “White Dickinson” forces the viewer to recognize his relationship with the work, noticing the subtle changes in light and color depending on his position. But unlike Judd’s repeated metal rectangles, all of these bars are separate works, each a different height with a different Emily Dickinson quote embedded in the aluminum. By inserting language, Horn injects her own personality and thus her own hand, breaking the fabricator assembly, non-artistic touch, and industrial mold of Minimalism...
Horn has stripped away text, but still alludes to this discussion of artistic relationships, memory, and change through image and juxtaposition alone in her most recent piece, “a.k.a.” The work consists of pairs of framed photographs of the artist at various stages of her life. Like the photographs of the sea, each image is incredibly different despite being joined by the common denominator of subject matter—in this case, a frontal headshot of Horn...