From Some Thames

This selection of framed photographs belongs to a series of 80 different images that comprise Some Thames, which depicts the surface of the Thames River in central London. These works extend Roni Horn’s larger, serial investigation into the visual, literary, and metaphoric possibilities of water. The artist stated: “Some Thames is literally the idea of a finite thing having an infinite range of appearance or expression because of its inseparable relation to other things.” The Thames—alternately transparent and opaque, violent and still, pastoral and urban, cleansing and dirty—offers a range of broad metaphors for an understanding of self. Some Thames, like most of Horn’s work, is an abstracted self-portrait. Self, like this river, is transcendently fluid, ultimately unknowable.