From the The St Louis Art Museum’s website:
Freund Fellow Sarah Oppenheimer (American, born 1972) is engaged in studies involving the reconfiguration of the built environment. In past work, she has explored the social navigation of architectural surroundings, as demonstrated in a recent project exploring subway commuters’ newspaper folding habits. Oppenheimer will develop the content of Currents 102 during a month-long St. Louis residency in the fall of 2007.
I recommend looking at some of this piece’s brothers and sisters on her website. The ones with titles that look like phone numbers.
i’ve been with her works a number of times. they are really amazingly compelling and what’s always interesting to me about them is that they – at least for me – function very nicely as IMAGES alone – in photos or online. and the thing is that i’ve always seen them in the context of 2D works so without fail i’ve read them as 2D first. i really want to see a two-person show with her and frank nitsche… there’s a resonance there.
Could I get someone who’s seen these, or who has a better take on them, to just kind of explain a little more about them?
Looking over the website I have three reactions:
-A lot of the work, including the picture above, I can’t make head or tails of. Seems like less design-y photos and some multiple views of the same objects would help.
-Some of the work just looks like hipster interior design. Seems kind of lame in a gallery context.
-Some of the work seems to have this ephemeral, poetic quality—the lovechild of James Turrell and Rivane Neuenschwander. I’m hoping to learn that all of the work is kind of in this vein, and maybe I could see it that way if I just understood what was going on a little better.
Help?
hrm… all of the projects on her page show multiple views of the same objects. they very much initiate a feeling of vertigo; i think that sense of confusion is a part of the draw.
The photos don’t induce vertigo. They just look like a spread in dwell magazine. I just can’t get a sense of the physical context.
everyday i stare at this picture and i hold my tongue. i kept hoping someone else would point this out, so that i wouldn’t have to. but, it looks as though: either this hasn’t occured to anyone else; or, there are other people out there who feel too silly to say anything…
this object looks like it should be featured in a Kotex commercial. this winter there were a ridiculous series of commercials put out by this ‘feminine hygiene products’ company. in the commercials, sanitary pads came to life, flying around like birds, and engaging in any number of shennanegans. all i can think about when i look at this object is that it should be cameoing in one of these commercials.
sorry. i know this takes some of the glamour away from the whole thing and i know that it is serious and that it is supposed to be based on some sort of spatial algorithm. but, come on, i can’t believe she could make this thing and not feel slightly foolish about hanging it on a wall.
really.
**this comment is reserved for this object and this object alone**
that cracks me up.
makes my associations with eames chairs, bugaboo strollers and bose speakers look pretty tame.
i know, huh?
for real though: one of these commercials came on when i was home for thanksgiving and was sitting around with my brother and a couple of other dudes. bad news all around. for both the boys and the girl in the room…
just one of those commercials that should have never-ever-ever-ever been made. an insult to any intelligent being.
it’s not hung there or flat in any sense. it’s a passageway. the ones i’ve seen are usually around 5 feet “deep” or long, and they often extend at some angle from the surrounding wall through to another opening in a different wall, sometimes traversing that distance horizontally or at some other angle. the “skateboard hanging on a wall” (or “feminine hygiene product hanging on a wall”) look is illusory. actually i think a lot about martha macleish’s work with these, in the sense of the viewer’s location really making the work seem to have certain parameters that defy logic in some way. martha’s work didn’t really go that way super far, but the fact that i often read oppenheimer’s work as both 2D and 3D – regardless of how “dwell-magazine-like” or slick they might be – seems like that’s part of the whole thing. i mean, they are superbly crafted and have super clean lines and exquisite materials in order to create the visual defiance we’re susceptible here. they are also shown in very even light. i really think all that’s part of what she’s aiming at, not just creating a space of disruption, etc.
Well, I owe Chris a beer. I thought someone was going to say ‘Barbara Hepworth’ right out of the gate.
These might look good in a room w/ Sarah McKenzie’s paintings on the wall, or maybe Matt Wycoff.
Hopefully, I’ll have a chance to see her work in St. Louis.
I don’t want anyone to get me wrong. I’m not baggin’ on the work itself, just the website, which doesn’t get the idea across to me somehow. I’ll try to do some more research on Oppenheimer tomorrow when I’ve got more time to spend on line, see if that clears things up.
review of her show here:
http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/entertainment/reviews.nsf/art/story/4FD34B730637E61C8625743D007B5AE4?OpenDocument
MAN has a great description of experiencing her work:
http://www.artsjournal.com/man/2008/05/sarah_oppenheimer_at_the_mattr.html