RONI HORN: For me, there's this
very hard balance between oneself
and one's work and the audience.
Some people live in a virtual in-their-headspace.
I don't.
I like to keep my feet in the moving water.
My ambitions lie
very much in dialog with my surroundings.
I don't know that there's any one thing that attracts me to water, you know?
And of course, if you start to think about water,
it just explodes because it's so rich and...and,
it's kind of everything and, nothing.
I almost feel like I rediscover water
again and again and again.
So it isn't me going out after water.
I think water's come in after me.
It's really much more,
much more the the the prey and not the predator in that relationship.
The Thames has,
the interesting fact attached to it that it is the urban river
with the highest appeal to foreign suiciders.
One of the points about shooting the Thames
was, was the fact that its darkness was quite real,
that people were in fact, it wasn't just a a visual darkness,
it was a psychological darkness, and it was an actual darkness.
And people are drawn to it...
for that exit option.
Even in its darkness, it has this picturesque element.
It's something about the human condition.
It's not the water itself, it's humanity’s
relationship to water,
because that's almost a human need,
that water be a positive force.
Every photograph is wildly different,
uh, even though you can be photographing the same thing. You know, from one minute
to the next, it's, uh...almost got the complexity of a of a portrait.
So, here we are.
We're in essentially the second largest town in Iceland, which is 15,000 people.
and it's called Akureyri. And it has the largest university outside of Reykjavík.
The weather's often quite poor in this area, so you can stay inside.
You can move about once you're in there,
it's like a little interior kind of, uh, metropolis.
And the piece is,
very large, about 80 photographs.
The idea is to lay it out in a way that is a flow through the building.
But depending on who you are and how you use the building, it's
a discovery process that could occur over days, months, or even years.
I like very much the idea
that the scale of the work is unknown...
but pervasive...
not dominating it, but setting kind of a tone for the space.
[ man lecturing in Icelandic ]
You're bringing the nature
inside the university walls.
And it makes you calm.
You see the students flow down the halls and with the water.
So for me, it's really changed the atmosphere.
It's like a very fine combination of people
flowing around and the water flowing around.
I think it's really great to have the water inside the building.
HORN: Of course,
I always thought of Iceland as a kind of studio for me,
or a quarry.
Maybe a quarry
is a good metaphor, because I always feel like I'm involved in a process of,
if not hunting, at least mining of some sort.
For Iceland, it's not so much about memory,
it's...it's more about that place
and my need to be there.
I had traveled in this area a number of times and I knew the lighthouse,
so I asked
the municipality if I could live in it.
They eventually said it was okay, and, uh, I went up there
and sat around and looked at the weather for a couple months--
a little bit of reading a little bit of drawing.
It was a psychological clearing,
and then it was also a way to connect with this island.
There was no ambition.
It was just to be there.
It's just real simple.
That was the whole agenda for the couple months, was just be there,
and it couldn't have been, in a way, more simple and more difficult.
“You are the Weather”--
the viewer walks in and you're surrounded by up to a hundred images,
which are one portrait of a person who is a multitude.
WOMAN: The original idea was to do this book on me,
which was not to be on me as a person,
but using my face as a place.
So the situation was just me
going into the water, and then she started photographing.
And she didn't give me any directions except for looking
into the lens of the camera.
HORN: It was very much of a wordless interaction for the two months we spent together.
And, uh, water became a very important part of the bond
and the image and, the subject.
The viewer relationship
to the portrait is, I think, very erotic,
because there is this eye contact and this ambiguity.
MODEL: We were spending a lot of time together
that affected the work, because
that created this trust,
which is very important.
HORN: In the case of You Are the Weather,
I was curious to see if I could elicit a place from her face,
almost like a landscape-- not...not in a literal sense,
but how close those identities were.
MODEL: And I remember when I went to the opening,
I was shy to enter that room.
But my son, who was only five years old at the time, he thought it was fantastic
and I would keep thinking of like, you know, going into a room,
but only seeing your mom on the wall--
that must be an experience.
And he kept calling me and saying, “Come, come. Mom, have you seen this room?”
It’s all you, it’s all you!”
[ softly ]: Oh...
HORN: There's this swimming pool,
actually, in Reykjavik that I really fell in love with.
The swimming pool itself is quite beautiful,
but then when I went down to the locker room, the locker room was amazing.
It just struck me as not only a kind of a Mobius,
because there are no edges, there's all surface.
And there's not one interior exterior edge among this net of lockers,
it's just an endless tiled surface. And it's got a collection of doors
that are both open and closed, and it's got these peepholes.
The peepholes are sort of what really kind of drew me in,
because you just wonder,
"What the hell are those peepholes doing there?" and nobody seems to know.
It was this incredible
kind of almost voyeuristic delight, this space.
It was designed by a voyeur and a chess player, I decided.
I shot it in a way to kind of bring out more of that sensual
aspect to balance against the antiseptic quality of the architecture.
I shot them as
almost like visual kind of, uh, traces.
There is a resemblance in the way
you move through the space versus across a chessboard.
NIECE: Ronnie is my aunt,
and we have a really good relationship.
For a while, we would send each other postcards
with to animals or to people or to objects
on them, and we would write, “This is me,” and point to one,
“This is you.”
Each of the pictures in the book are taken about two seconds or three seconds apart,
so if you were to look at one picture...
and then flip to the other side
and look at the first picture,
it would be the same image,
but a few seconds later.
HORN: So I really just recorded her in action.
And it looks like she's performing and all that stuff,
but you know, there's that period of a girl becoming a woman
where they're trying on all these identities.
It’s very much of a portrait of a girl,
because all of that different dress and the hair thing
and the...all this stuff with the face was not orchestrated.
NIECE: It does take place over about three years,
and just looking at it, it's somewhat difficult to tell that it's
the same person.
For instance, this one I have really, really short hair.
And then in this one I'm wearing some yellow
glasses and I have longer hair.
HORN: “Down by Water”--
it's the interrelationship between the two faced image, the front-back composition.
It's the drawing of the many elements interacting together,
and it's the drawing of the viewer through the space.
And, you know, this was originally a bank building,
and it's very beautifully proportioned and very full of itself.
You can see the paneling and the detailing and everything is...
uh, it's so beautifully designed and of a piece.
It's really almost impossible to occupy this space without, uh...
basically redefining it.
The piece flickers between a three-dimensional experience
and a two-dimensional.
When I was putting this work together, I knew that I wanted
disparate motifs coming together in close quarter.
It's viewable from every angle.
That may seem like, "Oh, every three-dimensional object is,"
but usually the relationship to the space is somewhat fixed.
And here it is. And I mean,
as you walk around the grouping of, you see these images are coming and going.
You're seeing some and others are dropping out.
All of that has to be in a way, composed.
So this is a work that has a very particular way
of moving the viewer through space and through image space,
which is very different than architectural space.
"The Cabinet Of"
I don't think I would have thought to do that work there if I hadn't
seen this little room, which is so claustrophobic, which was a vault.
It's a cabinet inside a cabinet,
and, uh, I love the idea that it's in the basement
and it's just functioning in a completely different way
than everything else.
The clown image, even though it's a photographic
work, has an architectural component and a psychological component.
You have the reference to something figurative, but it's also symbolic.
It's using those photographs
in the drawing technique.
I like the idea of taking this
very formal institution and putting a rubber floor in it.
I thought that is probably the right balance. It would have, you know,
kept things from from getting so out of whack
if we'd had that soft rubber floor in a few hundred years ago.
My relationship to my work is extremely verbal.
I am probably more language-based than I am visual,
and I moved through language to arrive at the visual,
although I think of text as visual as well.
I never really distinguish
between symbolic visual language versus
descriptive visual photograph.
I don't think of myself as a photographer or a sculptor.
I just think of myself in a more broad way.
So that allows me to draw upon these different forms...
without having to be identified with them.
You use metaphor to make yourself feel at home in the world.
You use metaphor to extinguish the unknown.
And for me, the problem is the unknown
is where I want to be.
I don't want it extinguished.
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