Ellipsis (II)
1998

For Ellipsis (II), Roni Horn photographed the changing rooms of a public swimming pool in Reykjavík, Iceland, a country to which she has traveled regularly since 1975. A labyrinth of rooms, hallways, and doors with peepholes, the changing area is covered with white tiles that curve around corners to form a single continuous surface. The doors are specially designed to close off one room while opening another. As a result, the architecture obscures boundaries between inside and outside. Horn mirrors this spatial effect in Ellipsis (II) through a dynamic arrangement of sixty-four tile-shaped images of doors, hallways, and walls. Through repetition, inversion, and scale–the work measures 8 x 8 feet–she invites the viewer to look across and through the expansive surface, initiating a voyeuristic journey encouraged by the mazelike architecture itself. As Horn commented on the viewing experience: “In Ellipsis you don’t really see what you’re looking at until you’ve seen it all, until you’ve looked at all of the sixty-four photographs. In the cumulative differences and similarities of the images and in the search it poses–the experience of the original space unfolds.”