This Is No Time

Ausstellung: Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, 2022

Fotos von Daniel Bradica

Sabine Hornig's sculptures, photographs and installations explore concepts of space, perspective, and memory. Her dynamic and often immersive compositions re-envision familiar architecture as well as ubiquitous urban forms. By blurring the boundaries between pictorial and real space, viewer and object, Hornig’s work both challenges and expands upon the ways in which her viewers perceive their surroundings at large.

This Is No Time consists of new photographic and glass works that expand upon Hornig’s extensive research on the city of New York for her large-scale installation La Guardia Vistas, commissioned by LaGuardia Gateway Partners in cooperation with Public Art Fund and installed in Terminal B at the airport in 2020. The transparent photo-collage fills an expansive 42-foot-high, 268-foot-wide glass facade along the front of the new terminal, visible from the building’s interior and exterior.

While reflecting on New York, Hornig was inspired by the 1939 World’s Fair (Your World of Tomorrow), which fostered building projects that championed democratic ideals and modernity at a time when Europe was backsliding into nationalistic dictatorships and war. Hornig combines intricate details from contemporary images of the cityscape with Mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s iconic phrases from this period to speak to critical themes in civil society that are timelessly present. Resembling political posters, the works transcend time via layers of the city’s architecture.

In Hornig’s images of the inverted city skyline, our habitual way of seeing is turned upside down, along with constructed orders and hierarchies. Day and Night Gold and Silver Negative depict the New York skyline interlocking with a distant night view. The daytime image of the skyscrapers brings out the recessed negative forms of the darker, nighttime images, and vice versa. Together these skylines create a sculptural perception of the city, where inside and outside as well as day and night interchange. Through overlapping perspectives as well as inversions of scale and dimension, Hornig questions the structures and histories that transform our collective experience.

A group of new hanging glass works are suspended from the gallery’s skylight. Taken from photographs of the city, colored, semi-transparent abstractions are silkscreened by hand and burned into the glass so that light penetrates the panes in color. As the viewer moves about the work, translucency and reflection vary, creating a symbiosis of photography, color, glass, and light, while also allowing the viewer to see him/herself reflected in the rear of the image.