About the Book

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.

Praise for LOG

“Entering LOG, you engage the active multiplicity of Roni Horn’s boundless mind in full bloom. You move into gold dust: a multiform epic of play and insight. Tidbits, jottings, doodles. Drawings, photos, writings. Heard, read, seen, sensed. Pondered, annotated, and arranged into a symphonic treasury of pure Roni Horn.” 

—Julie Ault, artist, curator, and editor

“As the days progress, entries on travel and photos of celebrities ... fade away, text gets denser and images of natural disasters emerge. So does an appreciation for what the pandemic cannot change: the wildlife that flourishes outside Horn’s upstate studio, or the cheery lights on a majestic skyscraper at night. Together, the images speak to how we acclimatize over time.... But Horn’s LOG is also a record of how we can try to survive in times of change: we watch Audrey Hepburn movies, we photograph the wildlife and sometimes we look up at the buildings and notice how strange it is that the lights are still on.” 

—Adriane Quinlan, T: The New York Times Style Magazine

“The third era defined by both paralysis and hope is upon us now. It is the recognition that, facing a grim future, hope itself can be an almost paralyzing, burdensome responsibility — that with Joe Biden’s swearing-in, those Americans hoping for better can no longer simply hope for it but have to work for it, have to overcome paralysis and begin to address the colossal responsibilities now foisted on us. All of this is the locomotive that powers Horn’s unnerving drawing. It is a flag for a new America.”

— Jerry Saltz, Vulture

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