Tasked with filling carafes of water for visiting sales directors, delivering them to Viewing Room 1, I learned of Roni Horn. Encountering an artist who seemed so wholly like oneself was not an everyday occurrence, as much as I wanted it to be at the time. Talk of insurance, of primary or secondary market, made artworks into framed, matted ornaments available only to those rabid with desire and perhaps unfairly, my eyes, ears and estimations had dulled to what would have otherwise fortified a belief in expression. Horn’s drawings and collages, with their close relationship to language and exploring the discomfort of time, drawn out mundanities, took me out of this stupor. I wrote to my friend to tell her of this, “The ornaments have become reflective. The walls dashed and purled in opalescence. The way sheet metal is bent to a spherical shape, two-or-four leaved, folded to nest ball bearing. A sleigh bell, cornered in Chelsea.” Years later I returned to this gallery for Horn’s LOG (March 22, 2019 – May 17, 2020), featuring hundreds of works on 8-by-11 inch paper, colored pencil, graphite, and screenshots laser printed then laid out as one horizontal grid. Dismantled the installation becomes a journal of sorts and though Horn labored over solitude as a theme central to her work prior to pandemic, she reminds the viewer a relationship, even to the certitude of solitude, can change. “June 15, 2019 - Being attached to something too small to see and too brief to have a past is hard to grasp. And though the image falsifies its nature, I look at it often,” she writes below a photo of a snowflake. “Paul Celan,” she writes below a photo of a poem, “What times are these when a conversation is almost a crime because it includes so much made explicit?” There are days when she includes a photo of a tree or the New York skyline, no context. She favors quotes by Flannery O’Connor and accounts of exotic birds she’s researched, or common birds near her Austerlitz studio. March 31, 2020, she writes in charcoal on neon yellow, “I am paralyzed with hope.” The piece nears its conclusion with, “Between the false and wrong memories and the true and right ones there’s little real difference, they are equally influential - May 9, 2020.” I didn’t survey the final entry. I didn’t want it to end, and writing this now I’m certain it hasn’t.
-Katie Calderon