Horn says she didn’t need to “figure out” that she was gay. “Consciousness—when does that start? Who the hell knows?” she says. As for her family, “who knows what they knew? Nobody said anything. It’s not something to talk about.” But she adds that her sexuality was “probably why I left them, went to school so early. I’m sure that fed into it.”
Whip-smart, Horn fled high school at 16 and enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design, which gave her a year’s worth of credits, “so it was a fast jaunt,” she says. She graduated at 19, and she flew to Iceland. In the Seventies, budget travelers routinely went to Europe by way of Reykjavik because of the cheap fares, though for most it was just a layover. Camping in a tent with her then girlfriend, Horn was knocked out by the landscape and the perpetually unstable weather. “I had the need to keep going back,” she says. “It wasn’t a conscious thing—it was more like a yearning. I always think of it as a migration because I prefer to keep my metaphor with the animals, and I had that sense of physiology to it.”
Though Horn had tinkered with cameras from her dad’s pawnshop, she was no more than a self-taught photographer, but Iceland inspired her to make photographs. With its weird volcanic landscape and primordial glaciers, the country would become her muse, or, as Todolí puts it, her El Dorado. “The cloud cover was always low,” Horn recalls. “You couldn’t really see—you just saw a tease. So I really believe that for a good 10 years or so I was going back to see a little bit more of what I couldn’t see.”
Among her large body of Icelandic-based art is an ongoing series of books, now numbering nine, titled To Place. Armed with a telephoto lens, she made You Are the Weather (1994–96), consisting of 100 photographs, all tight shots of a sole model’s face gazing directly at the viewer as she stands neck-deep in myriad indistinguishable pools and streams. The nearly imperceptible differences in the model’s expression—primarily a little less or a little more squinting, a slightly tilted head—are a reflection of the ever-changing weather. The viewer thus takes on the role of the weather. (“You Are the Weather, that’s a f---ing good title, girl,” Horn muses.) It’s a favorite piece of Whitney chief curator Donna De Salvo’s. “The faces require this incredibly acute and precise eye,” she says. “They really draw you in.” Artist Matthew Barney, a friend who also happens to be a frequent visitor to Iceland (by dint of his relationship with Björk), says Horn’s work “appears more formal than it is. In fact, it’s highly emotional.”
