Sarah Oppenheimer
D-17
16 September - 5 December 2010
Sarah Oppenheimer rethinks and reinvents the most taken-for-granted elements of architectural space: planes and holes. Within existing spaces she creates new walls, passages, and shaped holes to investigate how different kinds and configurations of perforated planes affect our perceptual experience of built space. Holes are her primary interest, and Oppenheimer has devised a system she calls a typology of holes to organize and define her installations. The typology consists of three basic categories: a wormhole, a cinema hole, and a horizon hole, each category designating not only the shape of the opening in the structure, but also the organization of space surrounding the opening that is the hole. From these she derives artistic situations that not only are beautiful to look at, but also elicit unforeseen visual and bodily sensations. For example, in her installation 610-3356 (2008), commissioned by the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, viewers looked into a 4th floor gallery that appeared to be empty except for a molded plywood form on the floor. However, walking into the space and toward the form revealed it to be not a solid object but rather, a shaped aperture through which one looked directly into a neighboring yard across the street. The sensation was as if the floor had dropped out, or as one visitor noted, I took my second step into the room and my stomach fell into my shoes.
For her Rice Gallery installation, Sarah Oppenheimer will explore a completely new kind of hole. To move beyond her existing typology, Oppenheimer will focus on the way light enters the Rice Gallery space through the buildings façade of exterior windows, an entry foyer area, and the gallerys front glass wall. By controlling the light that passes through these spaces, Oppenheimer’s installation will create surprising views for gallery visitors that will derive from glasss natural ability to be a window or a highly reflective surface depending upon the lighting conditions. As Oppenheimer explains, I have not yet generated a directed opening [a hole] that is at once mirror and window by using an existing curtain wall [the front glass wall]. This is what I plan to do at Rice.
The architectural experimentation required to define the installations final form will present a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Rice architecture students to work with Sarah Oppenheimer. Rice Gallery, in collaboration with the Rice School of Architecture, will present Wormholes through the Curtain Wall, a design workshop to take place in June 2010. Over three days Oppenheimer will lead eight students in an intensive study using light meters, digital cameras, Rhinoceros 3D design software, and a fabricated mock-up to analyze the light conditions and reflectivity affecting the gallerys glass wall. The classs research will not only determine data essential to the installations structure, but also provide the students specialized knowledge and hands-on experience which they can apply to their future work. Students will see the tangible results of their experiments in the construction of the installation, and their findings will be documented and published in the exhibition catalogue.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Sarah Oppenheimer received a BA in Semiotics from Brown University and an MFA from Yale University, where she holds the position of Critic in the Yale School of Art. She has exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad, most recently in Automatic Cities: The Architectural Imaginary in Contemporary Art (2009) at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. In 2007, she was the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Art, and she was named a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Oppenheimer has been a guest lecturer at the American Academy in Berlin, Brooklyn College, Columbia University, Cooper Union School of Architecture, Wesleyan University, Williams College, the Yale University School of Architecture, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illiniois.
