Name/Title
Water Body 4Entry/Object ID
2026.18.01Description
Eli Horn (b.1986, Camada) is a Canadian visual artist and designer whose interdisciplinary practice investigates perception, representation, and the relationship between finite forms and expansive natural phenomena. Working across video, sculpture, and installation, Horn creates works that invite sustained attention and contemplation, often drawing upon observations of the coastal environment that surrounds his home. Through precise material and formal decisions, his practice explores how repetition, scale, and duration can shape our understanding of place, time, and the infinite.
Water Bodies is a series of sculptural video works that examines the tension between the boundlessness of the ocean and the limitations of representation. Created from short looping recordings of ocean waves, each work captures a fleeting encounter with water and presents it within a carefully constructed frame, transforming a vast and ever-changing landscape into an intimate viewing experience.
Drawn from the artist's daily observations of the sea, the videos focus on the endlessly shifting surface of the water, where patterns continuously emerge and dissolve. The looping format suspends the waves between motion and stillness, creating a condition in which time appears circular rather than linear. Through repetition, the works reveal both the impossibility of fully capturing a natural phenomenon and the enduring human desire to do so.
Combining digital media with handcrafted sculptural elements, Water Bodies reflects on the ways in which technology mediates our experience of the natural world. The series proposes that meaningful encounters with the infinite can emerge through modest acts of observation, where close attention to a single fragment of the visible world opens onto larger questions of perception, presence, and scale.
"In Water Bodies, short looping videos suspend the ocean between stillness and motion. Waves repeat without progressing, held in tightly framed loops, compressing the infinite novelty of ocean waves into endlessly repeating patterns." - Eli HornArtwork Details
Medium
Single-channel video loop, electronic components, birchDimensions
Height
50.8 cmWidth
35.56 cmDepth
5.08 cm