Sarah Oppenheimer
Wednesday, 26 August 2009
Work from various installations.
I saw the Horizontal Roll installation in St. Louis about a year ago, it was a great piece that interacted extremely well with the environment.
“Sarah Oppenheimer creates social experiments in her videos and architectural installations, exploring how individuals navigate constructed space. Folding is the primary exercise in Oppenheimer’s works and something of a personal obsession; her website, FoldingPatterns.com, contains an index of triangular forms, illustrating the multitude of shapes that can be generated from a combination of creased lines.
Oppenheimer’s conceptual investigations have attracted high honors this year: she has been awarded both a Guggenheim Fellowship and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Art. Her interests in folded forms and spatial perception began when she was a student in Yale’s MFA program in the late ’90s. For her 2001 project Behavior Study, Oppenheimer observed subjects’ pace and patterns of movement through a room and then created a system of shelving units based on those measurements.
In her recent practice, Oppenheimer has been creating plywood modular forms, generating their structures from algorithms. At New York’s P.P.O.W. Gallery in September of 2006, she premiered 554-5251, a massive installation made from interlocking sheets of folded 4′ x 8′ plywood. By lining the walls with plywood veneer and constructing a succession of elevated, white-walled throughways, Oppenheimer turned the gallery space inside out. 554-5251 is the first in a series of works based on an algorithmic process; each of the seven numbers in the work’s title denotes an operation that determines the object’s form. 552-1251, shown at the American Academy of Arts and Letters last spring, is a wood-lined aperture in a gallery wall that opens sight lines into three different rooms. A portal between previously distinct spaces, the opening counteracts the rigid integrity of a traditional room and makes possible new interactions between gallery visitors.” HGM for artkrush