The American West is the driest it’s been in a thousand years. But the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver has never felt wetter.
In September, MCA Denver opened the five-month exhibition “Water, Water on the Wall, You’re the Fairest of Them All,” the first by artist Roni Horn to focus exclusively on Earth’s most precious liquid resource.
For museumgoers in the water-strained West, the exhibition could not feel more timely. With a federal deadline looming, the seven states of the Colorado River Basin have only days remaining to reach an agreement over how to divvy up the river’s shrinking waters.
As state negotiators trade proposals and barbs over who should shoulder the burden of much-needed cutbacks, Horn’s exhibition allows for a more nuanced conversation about scarcity, one that transcends the zero-sum logic of Western water politics.
Reflecting pools
Current visitors to MCA Denver are greeted by a pair of solid glass cylinders, each roughly the size of a carnival dunk tank. From a distance, the twin sculptures that comprise Horn’s “Water Double, v. 2,” differ only in color: one blue, one black.
With its frosted glass exterior, the blue sculpture resembles an iceberg—a soothing thought in this unseasonably warm fall. Its counterpart, in contrast, recalls black ice, the kind that can kill an unsuspecting motorist. It’s a heavy association, reinforced by the fact that each sculpture weighs multiple tons.
Drawing closer to “Water Double, v. 2,” the illusion of ice dissolves; the sculptures now appear as a pair of reflecting pools. As the work’s title suggests, the concept of reflection has a dual nature here: the glass reflects optically, the viewer mentally.
Staring into the transparent depths of the blue double, it is easy to subscribe to the longstanding myth that glass is a liquid. The truth, however, is more amorphous — literally.
Scientists classify glass as an amorphous solid, meaning it lacks the regimented structure of crystalline solids like diamond and ice. The resulting properties, including glass’s lack of a distinct melting point, are what enabled Horn to create sculptures of such size and solidity.
If the blue double is a tropical lagoon, the black double is the midnight zone, the ocean layer where light no longer penetrates. Anything, it seems, could be lurking beneath the sculpture’s glossy surface.
This contrast between the doubles—one refreshing, one unsettling—is a fitting introduction to “Water, Water on the Wall.” In Horn’s hands, the line between light and shadow is as fine as the one between drinking water and drowning in it.
Tidal rhythms
“Still Water (The River Thames, for Example)” is aptly named. The work comprises 15 photographs—that is to say, stills. But their subject, London’s River Thames, is anything but.
Standing in the center of the room, surrounded by the Thames’s varied textures, the impression is overwhelmingly one of movement, flux.
For a river flowing through one of the world’s largest cities, the Thames in these photos appears pleasantly free of human litter. Closer inspection, however, reveals unexpected flotsam: tiny numbers are suspended on the river’s surface.
These numbers function as buoys of a sort, annotations that connect the Thames’s eddies and wavelets to the footnoted text that runs along the bottom of each photograph.
Like waves crashing on shore, the footnotes of “Still Water” mimic and double back on each other, creating a kind of tidal rhythm. Certain phrases are repeated verbatim; others return in modified form.
“The river is a tunnel,” asserts one footnote. “The river is an entrance,” reads the next. “The river is a highway,” the third chimes in.
Through this process of variation, we arrive at “The river is civil infrastructure.” It’s a conclusion that the Colorado River negotiators, despite their differences, would no doubt agree with.
Death and Distance
The repetition of “Still Water” produces a calming effect, not unlike the white-noise recordings of water that many use to fall asleep. But as viewers soon discover, there are nightmares lurking beneath the Thames’ surface.
The Thames, the viewer learns, is a kind of black hole, one that exerts a gravitational pull on people who have taken lives and those who wish to end their own. Footnotes recount in grisly detail the dismembered and nameless bodies that routinely surface from the river’s murky depths.
By examining the Thames as a scene of murder and suicide, “Still Water” also recalls the violence that humans have visited on rivers, including the Thames itself.
In the mid-1800s, industrialization and urban population growth transformed the Thames into an open-air sewer, culminating in the “Great Stink” of 1858. Less than a century later, the Natural History Museum of London declared stretches of the river to be “biologically dead.”
In the United States, rivers have often fared no better. Between 1868 and 1969, Ohio’s Cuyahoga River caught on fire at least 10 times. Out West, engineering marvels like the Hoover Dam and the All-American Canal mean that the Colorado River, in addition to providing water for millions, rarely makes it to the sea.
The Hoover Dam in particular is highlighted by “Still Water” as an emblem of society’s disconnection from the water it depends upon.
“When you approach the Hoover,” observes one of the footnotes, “there’s nothing but distance between you and it. . . . And forget about the Colorado River, I mean where is it? Way the hell down there. (Seven hundred and twenty-six feet down there.) You wouldn’t even know there was a river if it wasn’t a dam.”
Dry water
Traversing the annotated waters of the Thames, one encounters a concept — anhydrony — that seems custom-built for the drought-stricken West.
“Anhydrony,” a footnote explains, “is waterless water, the opposite of water. The form remains liquid but the substance is altered — replaced with another identity. Anhydrony is dry water.”
The paradox posed by dry water is not entirely new. “Water, water, every where, / Nor any drop to drink,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote in his 1798 poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” describing the torment of sailors dying of thirst amid an ocean of saltwater.
The 1922 Colorado River Compact can also be seen as an exercise in anhydrony. When determining how much water to allocate to the Upper and Lower Basin states, the river commissioners ignored the most up-to-date data on annual river flow and instead based their calculations on an abnormally wet period in history.
Under the terms of the resulting compact, the Upper and Lower basins were allotted a combined annual total of 15 million acre-feet of water. But today, with climate change disrupting rain and snowfall patterns, annual flows are averaging closer to 12 million acre-feet.
As a result of this discrepancy, the Colorado Basin states find themselves in an awkward and increasingly dire position: their paper rights exceed the wet water that is actually available.
The West, you could say, is awash in dry water.
Kiddie pools, stock tanks
Further into the exhibition is a second collection of cast-glass cylinders. They bear a clear resemblance to “Water Double, v. 2,” but these sculptures are far smaller: one would have to stack all five on top of each other in order to approximate the earlier doubles.
One might expect these smaller sculptures to feel more approachable, more welcoming. But after the abundance of “Water Double, v. 2,” the reduction in scale is closer to alarming. Compared to their jumbo-sized predecessors, these nameless sculptures appear to have melted or evaporated.
Walking among the squat cylinders, visitors are confronted, not only by their own reflection, but also by the specter of scarcity.
Faced with uncertainty, humans instinctively reach for the familiar. If the monoliths of “Water Double, v. 2,” are roughly the shape and size of a dunk tank, then the sculptures of “Untitled” are more akin to a kiddie pool. Alternatively, one may see in them the round stock tanks that dot the West’s public rangelands, manmade oases for herds of parched cattle.
Kiddie pool and stock tank — the former emblematic of suburbia, the latter of the range — are equally valid associations. In presenting both options (and leaving room for others), the sculptures allow themselves to be filtered through the viewer’s personal relationship with water, whether that be municipal or agricultural.
In an exhibition titled “Water, Water on the Wall, You’re the Fairest of Them All,” these multifaceted pools are a useful reminder that the beauty of water is in the eye of the beholder.
Human weather
In one of the museum’s second-floor galleries, the walls are lined with 100 photographs of the same woman’s face. The label on the wall identifies her as Margrét Haraldsdóttir Blöndal, an Icelandic artist who accompanied Horn on a tour of Iceland’s geothermal pools.
The photographs are cropped so tightly that they exclude nearly all of the background. Identifying the location is impossible, but also irrelevant: this is not so much portraiture as landscape photography, with Blöndal’s face the elemental terrain.
As with “Still Water,” the most prominent theme is repetition, variation. From one frame to the next, Blöndal’s face changes almost imperceptibly. A tilt of the head, the raising of an eyebrow: for the most part, these are all the viewer has to tell them these are different photos.
The most dramatic change occurs when a curtain of steam drifts between the camera and Blöndal, who temporarily fades from view like a mountain face behind a bank of clouds. No coincidence, then, that the collection is titled “You are the Weather, Part 2.”
Comparing the side-by-side photographs of Blöndal reveals a kind of personal weather, one that is defined by short-term variation. But the collection also hints at long-term change, the kind that is more often associated with climate.
Horn’s original “You are the Weather,” which likewise features 100 photographs of Blöndal, was created in 1997. “Part 2” was completed in 2011. For present-day viewers in 2025, it is hard not to speculate — not to worry — about the changes that have taken place in the decades since Horn and Blöndal’s first collaboration.
Across Iceland, glaciers are in retreat, with the Okjökull Glacier declared dead in 2014.
In England, the warming waters of the Thames are increasing the risk of toxic algae blooms.
In the Colorado River Basin, reductions in snowpack runoff have resulted in the loss of more than a Lake Mead’s worth of water.
Affixed with Blöndal’s penetrating gaze, one cannot hide from an uncomfortable truth: as a result of our lifestyles and our emissions, we are all the weather now.
Compromise and confluence
Taken as a whole, what does “Water, Water on the Wall” say about our era of global climate change and regional water scarcity? The answer, like Horn’s work, defies easy categorization.
The annotated images of “Still Water” show that water can abet violence and inspire self-harm, as the bodies dredged from the Thames attest. At the same time, the hot springs of “You are the Weather, Part 2,” recall water’s power to cleanse and renew.
Ultimately, it is Horn’s glass sculptures that feel most suited to the present-day West, to a river basin at a management crossroads. With reflections that shift based on the viewer’s perspective, works like “Water Double, v. 2,” remind us that the nature of water is as varied as its users.
The seven states of the Colorado River Basin each have their own economies, geographies and politics. To achieve compromise, the parties must find a way to concede ground while holding firm to their fundamental interests. In other words, they must try to follow the river’s example: constancy through constant change.
“When you go down to the river,” reads a “Still Water” footnote, “you’re killing two birds with one stone: you stand there and you go places.”
The same can be said of Horn’s transporting exhibition. Should compromise remain out of reach, the Colorado River negotiators might do well to consider a field trip.
“Water, Water on the Wall, You’re the Fairest of Them All,” at MCA Denver through Feb. 15, 1485 Delgany St., Denver.