Sarah Oppenheimer talks about her art

“When you touch something you lose the distance and the self-containment required for a contemplative gaze, and I think that’s really, really interesting in relation to inhabiting architecture and specifically in relation to doors. The reason these works started to move, initially, is that I was very interested in the problem of a threshold, and the problem of a door, and how the door created the opportunity for change that had to do with how your body navigated passing through space. And I wanted the work to operate like a switch basically, like a door, that would allow you to enter once space and depart from another. …[The work] forces us to reconsider any primary orientation to the space we’re in, and also then, therefore, to this work itself.”

“I’ve been having a very long conversation about the possibility of the ‘door swing’ as a time-based trace. So if you look at how doors are represented in architectural drawings, they have this circular path that the door travels in. And it’s been interesting to think what happens when you’re drawing an eccentric rotation of a door. That simple circular path, first of all, is not so simple, it’s actually the trace of a time-based activity, crystallized into a single diagram. But when that motion becomes eccentric, meaning it doesn’t follow the axis of gravity, it starts to all sorts of unusual things. To me it became very, very interesting to think about how space mediated our engagement and our notion of memory and time and procession, as it evolved. And how every space in it had its own time, its own duration.”

“Glass is such an extraordinary material and I have found it endlessly surprising and challenging…. We often imagine that glass is marvelous when it has many different coatings but what is most extraordinary about it is that you see through it. And that points towards its dependency…. Things become dependent on other things; Like Matisse’s front is dependent on where the door lies in the room, I would say the transparency or reflectivity of the glass is dependent on where light is in relation to the glass. …It does all sorts of things and it really is a highly dependent condition. I suppose all things are, and somehow it feels like it performs its dependency in a more obvious way.”

–Sarah Oppenheimer on Tyler Green’s ‘Modern Art Notes’ on her new work #s334743