Art Intermission Vol. 2

For the last 30 or so years the New York-based artist Roni Horn has been making work in Iceland. It has become her second home, and she has produced several large-scale permanent installations there. One of those is the Library of Water in Stykkisholmur, a small fishing town just two hours north of Reykjavik. The Library of Water used to be Stykkisholmur's actual library, but when its contents were moved to a new building in town, the small, old library -- sitting atop a hill on the edge of town facing the ocean -- was left empty. So Horn proposed using the site for her portrait of Iceland.

The Library of Water has two art pieces within it. Water, Selected contains water samples taken from 24 glaciers around Iceland. The water is contained in glass columns that are spread irregularly around the library space. The light in the columns is quite beautiful, and while there doesn´t appear to be much difference between the waters, you can see bits of different kinds of sediment at the bottoms of the columns.

On the floor is a piece called You Are The Weather (Iceland). It consists of Icelandic and English words that can be used to describe the weather. The floor is made of some slightly sticky rubbery material, and the text is made of different colored pieces of the same material cut out and placed in the floor. So as not to mess the floor up or leave sock fuzzies all over it, you take your shoes off at the entrance and put on white, plastic-bottomed slippers.