Roni Horn: Water, Water on the Wall, You’re the Fairest of Them All: MCA Denver, Denver
Presenting works in a range of mediums – including sculpture, photography, drawing, and bookmaking – Horn’s solo exhibition is the first to focus exclusively on the concept of water. Including signature works from her oeuvre, such as You are the Weather, Part 2 (2010 – 11), a series of 100 photographs of a woman submerged in various geothermal pools across Iceland; a series of never-before-exhibited cast glass sculptures, whose reflective surfaces allude to a pool of water; and books from To Place, an ongoing series of publications initiated in 1989, which address the artist’s relationship between identity and place.
Horn’s use of water as content furthers her interests in paradox and identity, both recurring themes in her work. In her own words, “You say water is troubled or calm. You say water is rough and restless. You say water is quiet. Water is serene and sometimes clear, it might be pure and then it is brilliant. Water is heavy; that’s a fact. Water is often tranquil, even placid. Water is still and then it might be deep as well. Water is cold or hot, chilly or tepid. You say water is brash or brisk, sometimes crisp. You say water is soft and hard. You say water irritates and lubricates. You say water is foul. You say water is fresh. You say water is limpid and languorous. You say water is sweet.”
Horn’s paradox of water is analogous to that of human identity: that something so fixed and stable in what we imagine it to be is — in reality— dynamic, unpredictable, and inchoate. For regions like Denver and the Intermountain West, this paradox has regional and cultural relevance: for centuries, water has been an assumed resource, readily available in manifold forms. Amidst climate change and population pressure, however, that resource is increasingly at risk, posing an immediate threat to the stability of both the natural environment and our human experience of it.
