While visiting the Rathole Gallery, a confident 3 year-old told me that his favorite work in the current exhibition, Roni Horn’s “The Selected Gifts,” was a picture of meatballs.
Among the straightforward, but nonetheless very beguiling, studio photographs of objects that the New-York based artist has received as gifts over several decades, the meatballs are notable for being perishable. Other objects, such as an old copy of Virginia Woolf's "Orlando," a pebble, a Rolex, Flintstones figurines, a handmade velvet heart and a re-photographed work by Jurgen Teller, seem to have been kept by Horn for years.
The absolute precision and neutrality of the photography makes the representation of the objects more visually compelling than some of the actual gifts were originally, but that's perhaps incidental. While Horn's work often features beautiful photographs, her focus is more on using photography beautifully, and absorbing our attention so that we get caught up in her thinking.