NARRATOR: The following excerpt is courtesy of Art 21, Inc. In it, Roni Horn talks about the genesis of her piece Ellipsis (II).
RONIHORN: 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. There’s not one interior-exterior edge among this nest of lockers, it’s just an endless tiled surface. And it’s got a collection of doors that are both opened and closed. And it’s got these peepholes. The peepholes are what really 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 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.
