Key and Cue, No. 1609 – Sunset That Screens, Reveals belongs to one of Roni Horn’s best-known series of work. Deeply affected by the distinctly singular approach to language evidenced in Emily Dickinson’s writings, Horn materialises striking lines from the nineteenth-century author’s letters and poems in elongated sculptural forms. In a project begun in the early 1990s, plastic letters are set within aluminium rods. Designed to be displayed propped against a wall, the bars reveal their text when viewed from the front. A side-view of the work yields abstract white and black bars that visualise Horn’s conviction in the subjective nature of both language and art – each viewer establishes a different interpretation of the sculptural work and corresponding meaning of Dickinson’s text depending on their own physical position in the gallery.
The Key and Cues series from which the present work is drawn, takes the first lines of Dickinson’s poems as its subject matter. Horn relates that these lines ‘became a kind of “cue”, like a reference point, a direction, a necessary tool in itself’ to explore new realms of possibility prompted by the sensibility of the American poet’s writing.i The present sculpture materialises the first line of Dickinson’s four-line poem, No. 1609:
Sunset that screens, reveals
Enhancing what we see
By menaces of Amethyst
And Moats of Mysteryii
Employing distinctly painterly language, Dickinson expresses the transformative power of light which serves as a metaphor for the veiling and unveiling of human perception. The rods make it possible to ‘walk among’ the poet’s words – to have what Horn describes as ‘an actual experience in time’ – facilitated by the powerful material encounter with language.iii
