Tag: Roni Horn

Two artists Weathering Art: Roni Horn and Jari Silomaki

roni-horn-large

Roni Horn has a book about her ongoing project in Iceland

Weather Reports You

 

by Roni Horn

Pub: Steidl & Partners.  Available on Amazon

“Everyone has a story about the weather. This may be the single thing each of us holds in common. And though the weather varies greatly from here to there, it is, ultimately, one weather that we share. Small talk everywhere has occasioned the popular distribution of the weather. Some say talking about the weather is talking about oneself. And with each passing day, the weather increasingly becomes ours, if not us. Weather Reports You is one beginning of a collective self-portrait.” Roni Horn

Over the past two years Roni Horn has been working with a small team in the southwest of Iceland gathering personal testimonies from people talking about the weather. These “weather reports” include descriptions, reflections, memories and stories based on experiences of the weather that range from the matter-of-fact to the marvellous. The different nuances and usages of language suggest that the weather is not just a matter of meteorological conditions but is, in Roni Horn’s words, “a metaphor for the physical, metaphysical, political, social and moral energy of a person and a place”.
A wonderful article HERE

Brilliant set of resources including videos HERE

Jari Silomaki

You might be interested to link Roni Horn’s idea with this Finnish photographer Jari Silomaki

 

Some time ago, when I first saw an exhibition of Silomaki’s work I wrote the following;

Powerful resonance in yoking the subjective eye with the global event

An appreciation of the art of Finnish photographer Jari Silomaki

 The Finnish photographer Jari Silomaki writes on the photographs he shows – in the exhibition I saw he wrote in white ink. He writes about the photograph he took and its context in his life and the fact that it was coincidental with some major event. Several of his arresting photographs can be seen HERE: 

jari-silomaki-finlandia-hallSOURCE

 ‘Since 2001 I have taken a landscape photograph every day. I connect these photographs to important personal and world political events…. The starting point of this work was that world events, personal events and weather will repeat themselves and merge into one continuum……. On the other hand, linking landscape and news concretises how we are in contact with world events through the media. Everything is brought up close, which also means that events that are truly nearby are no longer close.’ 

Jari Silomaki, photographer (Finland)

 For me Silomaki, and this idea, is one of the most exciting finds in many years. The linking of the public events and the choice of a landscape brings powerfully together the subjective and the public.   It’s not only about the cataclysmic such as Kennedy’s assassination or the Twin Towers attack but also anything significant on global news.

Concerning the cataclysmic I remember the Twin Towers collapse because my wife and I were in Ikea having taken an American friend. In the case of Kennedy’s assassination I was in a weight-training club above a green-grocer’s shop where the smell of the potatoes and greens from downstairs was (thankfully) just more powerful than the smell of sweat. I didn’t take those two ‘memory-photographs’, but the Ikea one I could still take, because we all remember where we stood as the sense of horror began to fill in the store.  The green-grocer shop I’m sure is no more.

 One of the interesting elements in Silomaki’s great idea is the sense that you get when you realize that he chose ‘this perspective’h, ‘this angle’, ‘this composition’ as the personal – with the global news circulating in that day’s consciousness. The images become impregnated with the facts both personal and public. They create, for me, an oceanic resonances drawn from time and timelessness and place and placelessness, the subjectively personal and the binding knowledge that comes from global news.  Why because we see what the photographer held to be significant in the ravaging consciounes of the event.  We are seeing his world with his eyes.

In seeing the world with his eyes the question is raised as to the relationship between what he frames in the photograph and the frame created by the writing.   Is that a limiting aesthetic?  Is it limiting because we don’t know more about the web of significances in the photographer’s environment.

The human form as landscape.

I became interested in landscape and the human body, the human body as landscape when I first saw Bill Brandt’s wonderful nudes – several taken on Sussex beaches;

Astonishing - wide-angle, up-close, cropped?
Astonishing - wide-angle, up-close, cropped? (two people?)

Others, including Eldor Gemst, have carried on the theme;

Perfection in 'human landscape'?
Perfection in the human form ?

In an exhibition of work by Roni Horn at the CAC Madrid I discovered another dimension.  One of her projects gave rise to a book ‘Weather Reports You’.  In it she says;

Weather Reports You by Roni Horn Pub: Steidl & Partners

“Everyone has a story about the weather. This may be the single thing each of us holds in common. And though the weather varies greatly from here to there, it is, ultimately, one weather that we share. Small talk everywhere has occasioned the popular distribution of the weather. Some say talking about the weather is talking about oneself. And with each passing day, the weather increasingly becomes ours, if not us. Weather Reports You is one beginning of a collective self-portrait.” Roni Horn
Over the past two years Roni Horn has been working with a small team in the southwest of Iceland gathering personal testimonies from people talking about the weather. These “weather reports” include descriptions, reflections, memories and stories based on experiences of the weather that range from the matter-of-fact to the marvellous. The different nuances and usages of language suggest that the weather is not just a matter of meteorological conditions but is, in Roni Horn’s words, “a metaphor for the physical, metaphysical, political, social and moral energy of a person and a place”.

horn-roni-cac

Another piece by Roni Horn extended the idea of landscape and the human form further for me – the idea that the human form, in this case various portraits of a young man, could be set up as a landscape through which we can walk.