Klosterfelde

Lisa Oppenheim

10 Nov - 21 Dec 2012

© Lisa Oppenheim
Man holding large camera photographing a cataclysmic event, possibly a volcano erupting, 1908/2012., 2012
silver gelatin b/w photograph on bromide paper exposed and solarized by fire light, unique in a series (tiled version IV)
83,5 x 100,5 cm
LISA OPPENHEIM
Vapours and Veils
10 November — 21 December 2012

Klosterfelde is pleased to announce Lisa Oppenheim’s second solo show at the gallery. Vapours and Veils is comprised of three distinct bodies of work that conjure the mystery and urgency of early photography while dealing with materials and concerns that are very much of the present.

In the front room, a 19th-century photograph of the passage of the moon over rural France is remade as a negative and exposed to recent New York City night skies over the course of several summer evenings.

Displayed in the second room is a new series of photograms entitled, Fish Scales, Véritable Hollandais , 2012. The fabrics used to make these photograms are mechanically produced textiles from the Netherlands that mimic the handmade batiks of Indonesia which are in turn almost entirely exported to West Africa. The cloth is used as a negative, placed directly on the photographic paper and folded at different angles yielding moiré like patterns that repeat imperfectly throughout the series. Mechanically produced and theoretically infinitely reproducible patterns are made unique through a hand intervening in the supposedly infinitely reproducible medium of photography.

Oppenheim continues and expands upon her ongoing project Smoke in the third gallery space. Digitally printed negatives of last years’ riots in London, Allied bombing raids over occupied France, and an early 20th-century volcano eruption are exposed and solarized using the light of a small kitchen torch. In this way, process and content are collapsed as well as the time between the various fires depicted in the source photographs and the flames’ reemergence in the darkroom.

Oppenheim’s upcoming shows include a two-person project at the 21er Haus in Vienna and solo exhibitions at the Kunstverein Göttingen and the Grazer Kunstverein. Oppenheim’s work has been exhibited at the ICA London, the Guggenheim Museums, New York, Berlin and Bilbao; Tate, St. Ives; the New Museum, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Houston; the Swiss Institute, New York and the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA. She is a graduate of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and received an MFA in 2002 from Bard College. From 2004 to 2005 she was a fellow at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam.
 

Tags: Lisa Oppenheim