Eli Horn
January 22, 2026 to February 21, 2026
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Eli Horn’s exhibition statement begins with a quote from the American artist and writer, Djuna Barnes:
“An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties.”
Barnes, born in 1892, was writing from a nascent era of image-making. In her lifetime, the dominant modes of images would shift from painterly, hand-crafted, aestheticized work to a mass-produced realism made newly possible with the advent of handheld cameras. Still documentary, photojournalism, and colour photography would take reign over The Image. 9 years after Barnes’ passing, Kodak would launch its first professional digital camera, in 1991. Today, most of us carry a much more advanced one in our pocket, itself a container of images, too.
In 2026, it is redundant to say we live in a world proliferated and oversaturated by images, but to observe it always unnerves me. I often think of a different quote from Susan Sontag’s “On Photography”, published in 1977:
“A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats.”
The sheer volume of images commanding our attention each day can make our time feel fractured, nonlinear. It’s dizzying and purposefully disarming. Sometimes, I wonder what Sontag would have thought about Instagram, or what Barnes would have thought of short-form video content of AI slop.
The Image is the central subject of Horn’s exhibition, “Living Within The Image”, on show at lens-based gallery, Gallery 881—but not the sort we’ve become accustomed to while scrolling. It is Barnes’ fundamental version of The Image that Horn revitalizes and ruminates on here, and Horn’s focus and fidelity to natural scenes—water, light, the path of a stream—reemphasize this return to The Image As Stop, asking the audience to reject the pornographic, advertising culture of The Contemporary Image, Sontag’s weapon of propaganda. For this exhibition, Horn pulls together 3 different series—”Water Body”, “Stream”, and “Walking In The Edge”—showcasing 3 works from each. These scenes recall a tactile, undigitized world, such that The Image presented could even be conjured in the mind.
From here, Horn negotiates and plays with the form. In “Water Body”, Horn utilizes fixed shot, single-channel video loops of moving water, framing them in the centre of larger, birch blocks. The wooden frames reemphasize the natural textures at work here and throughout the show, and their engulfing size seems to visually compact the video into its tighter, rectangular space. The overall composition makes each video appear like a small window into a larger, obstructed scene—a secret peep into a show. The videos close-focus on the moving, rippling water and the light reflecting off them is meditative in quality, the looping, fixed shot emphasizing the idea of a static image being stretched over time.
In “Stream”, Horn continues this focus on natural scenery by manipulating the image across the space of its frame. The linear identity of a stream is toyed with, their paths and bodies stretched and dragged. These pieces are each 82 x 32 x 2.5 inches in size—large vertical compositions of archival pigment print mounted on Dibond in custom cedar frames. The materials confer a matte, subdued effect; the tranquility of the moment becomes unnerving to me. As the streams distort, their nature becomes suspect. I feel like the image is reminding me that what I am looking at is no longer real, at risk of becoming something only remembered in images, the stream being interrupted and coming to a halt, already dried up.
The most moving series to me is “Walking In The Edge”: 2 pieces (“Walking In The Edge 2” and “Walking In The Edge 3”) of archival pigment print mounted on Dibond in custom ash frames, and one unique piece (“Walking In The Edge 1”) consisting of an inkjet print mounted on a dimensional MDF assembly. For these pieces, Horn presents a total image composed of sequential images, rendered as vertical strips compiled into one longer horizontal piece: stops of time spliced together, an image as timeline. The height of each strip conveys a weight and gravity, but their short length communicates a brief, fleeting lifespan, the overall composition depicting a brief moment stretched across even tinier ones, in a way that feels both sacred and tragic, full and immediately lost. When you step back, the total image is a blur. Unlike today’s Contemporary Image, which effectively accelerates and bombards our processing of time, Horn takes a moment here—a Stop—and stretches it out as in a way that is yearning, doting, romantic.
Horn’s aesthetic skill for colour is on full display here and throughout “Living Within The Image”, but what makes “Walk In The Edge” so affecting to me is the child at its centre, moving between segments, at times looking directly at the camera. In his exhibition statement, Horn writes of “a shift in temporal register that accompanies parenthood”, and the pieces here are full of a longing and wistfulness.
“Living Within The Image” boasts an aesthetic sensibility that works within Horn’s artistic framework to balance expectation while offering thoughtful considerations of form and effect. I am not much of a nature person, nor a technical camera aficionado, nor am I a parent. But I do think a lot about time, as Horn seems to do. “I’m interested in how these imaging systems shape what we take the world to be, rather than simply reflect it. Where does the image end?” When I take in this show, I feel an urgency: to put the camera down, and take in a moment.
