Roni Horn: LOG

LOG (March 22, 2019–May 17, 2020), produced daily over a period of fourteen months, is a collection of drawings, quotations, collages, photographs, casual commentaries, notes on news and weather events, and original texts by Roni Horn. Known for conceptually oriented work in diverse media, Horn continues her exploration of identity and difference in LOG. The collection, with its 406 drawings, ranges from the humorous and strange to the sublime and disturbed. Lodged in this context is the complexity of daily, lived experience. The dates LOG records encompass the mundane scroll of life, the global pandemic’s early days, a political system in breakdown, local bird and animal life, and radical changes in weather. It also includes more formal texts and drawings, some becoming leitmotifs threaded throughout the work. LOG transforms personal experience into an emotionally profound and unusual visual engagement. First exhibited in New York City in early 2021, this is a beguiling and immersive body of work that invites repeated viewing.

LOG is a diaristic poem, and if poetry is the most reliable navigator of tragedy, LOG may well be a guidebook. These pages record the relentless inquiries of an artist always at work, looking inward and outward, forward and back. LOG asks, “Is it true that rare things only become more rare?” The rarity here is Roni’s mind, and our opportunity to wander with it in the strangest of years. Roni Horn’s LOG is a beautiful book from a masterful maker of books. – Matthew Barney