Part I: October 17, 2001-February 17, 2002
"Blah, blah, blah, your hair,
Blah, blah, blah, your eyes;
Blah, blah, blah, blah, care,
Blah, blah, blah, blah, skies."
-George and Ira Gershwin

Part II: February 27-June 16, 2002
"Blah, blah, blah, blah, moon,
Blah, blah, blah, above;
Blah, blah, blah, blah, croon,
Blah, blah, blah, blah, love."
-George and Ira Gershwin


A two-part exhibition of works by Roni Horn will open at Dia Center for the Arts on October 17, 2001. Each part will feature three series of photographically based works, together with the new sculpture Untitled (Yes) (2001), all of which continue Horn's longstanding interest in questions of difference and identity.

Sited in two rooms, the pair of elements that comprise Untitled (Yes) 2001, activates memory to explore notions of difference and sameness. A glass block of exceptional clarity renders almost paradoxical the idea of physical transparency, while its opaque counterpart becomes equally confounding: a black mirror mutates all reflection into a spectral negative of itself. Contending modalities of phenomena and appearance also subtend Clowd and Cloun (Gray) (2001), a series of alternating images of these two motifs. 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.

Taken with a point-and-shoot camera, the panoply of images of a young girl that make up This Is Me, This Is You (2000) is presented in two paired groups located on opposite walls of the gallery. 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. The earliest body of work to be included in the exhibition, Some Thames (2000), like This Is Me, This Is You, takes up the idea of the multitude in one. It further develops Horn's ongoing fascination with the amorphous, essential, elusive, but familiar, nature of water, a fascination that also informs Saying Water (2001), a related audio CD produced specially for this show.

In Part II of the exhibition, a second variant of the Clowd and Cloun series will be shown, and Some Thames will be replaced with a new photographic work, Becoming a Landscape (2001).

Roni Horn
Since the 1970s, Horn, who was born in 1955, has produced work in a variety of mediums, including sculpture, photography, drawing, essays, and books. She has had solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2000); MusŽe d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1999); De Pont Foundation for Contemporary Art, Tilburg, the Netherlands (1998; 1994); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (1996); Kunsthalle Basel (1995); Baltimore Museum of Art (1994); Kunstmuseum Basel (1997; 1995); New Museum for Living Art, Reykjavik (1992); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1990), and elsewhere. She has also exhibited at the Venice Biennale (1997); Documenta IX (1992), and the 1991 Whitney Biennial. Since 1989, Horn's Things That Happen Again (1986) has been on long-term exhibition at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. She is a participant in the Thames and Hudson Rivers Project, sponsored by Minetta Brook (New York) and the Public Art Development Trust (London).

Roni Horn received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Yale University. She teaches at the Columbia University School of the Arts and lives and works in New York City.

Exhibition Support
Support for this exhibition has been provided by the Lannan Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Werner Kramarksy, and the members of the Dia Art Council.

Dia Center for the Arts
Established in 1974, Dia Center for the Arts plays a vital role among visual arts institutions nationally and internationally by initiating, supporting, presenting, and preserving art projects in nearly every medium, and by serving as a primary locus for interdisciplinary art and criticism. Its first major projects were long-term sited works of art not likely to be accommodated by conventional museums because of their nature or scale, created by artists such as Walter De Maria, Dan Flavin, and Donald Judd.

Dia presents a temporary exhibition program in its renovated warehouse buildings in Chelsea, New York. Supplementary programming in Chelsea includes commissioned artist web projects, lectures, poetry readings, film and video screenings, performances, scholarly research and publications, symposia, and an arts education program that serves area students. Dia is currently constructing a new facility in Beacon, New York, sixty miles north of New York City, to display its permanent collection, which comprises in-depth holdings of many of the most important artists of the 1960s and 1970s.

Exhibition hours during the 2001-2002 season are Wednesday through Sunday, 12 noon to 6 pm, from September 12, 2001.