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Sarah Oppenheimer at the Baltimore Museum of Art by Cara Ober

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This article was originally published in Art Papers Magazine, in the March/April 2013 Issue.

From a distance, Sarah Oppenheimer’s architectural intervention W-120301 reads as a matte black rhombus, a minimalist painting, that blends harmoniously with the lean sculpture of Anne Truitt and David Smith in the Baltimore Museum of Art’s Mid-Century Abstraction gallery. With each approaching step, however, the object mutates dramatically museum visitors peer in, placing their heads inside in order to scrutinize the mysterious interior from all directions. W-120301 appears to shapeshift from solid to void as rows of diagonal perforations, seams between the black aluminum planes, come slowly into focus and indicate an impossibly expanding space.

Encountered head on, this object is a window, divided into four diagonal vignettes. The lower left corner reveals a dramatic view through the wall of a circular cement turret and balcony bathed in undulating spotlights. The upper right corner reflects blonde pine flooring seen from a disorientating distance. As museum visitors wander through this particular vignette, they seem to climb the wall at an absurd angle; it’s like an M.C. Escher illustration, a dizzying sensation for the viewer.

Viewed close up, the interior space opens up exponentially: a dark rhombus sits high above, nonchalantly reflecting the top of your head and revealing the shoes of museum visitors standing behind you. When you look directly down, a black chute opens all the way to the ground floor atrium; a story below, against a distant backdrop of black slate tiles, crowds of people pass through the open space, scurrying like windup toys.

As the viewer attempts to reconcile the visual puzzle, it becomes obvious that none of these views adds up from a logical standpoint. Attempting to connect disparate observations into a singular vision, hoping to combine compressed depth of field with actual space, the experience of W-120301 is confounding and thrilling: it invites curious viewers to reconsider assumptions about space, distance, light, and even their fellow museum visitors. The museum’s second floor, once an under-utilized contemporary gallery, now attracts a steady stream of visitors who patiently wait in line to interact, on an intimate level, with this new work.

As part of a recent year-long renovation of the museum’s Contemporary Wing, the Baltimore Museum of Art is the first major institution to commission permanent works by Oppenheimer, a young artist known for her elegant yet brazen architectural interventions that render static space into dynamic experiences. As the BMA continues to update and reinvent itself, Oppenheimer’s presence at the center of this transformation signifies an ambitious forward-looking agenda focusing on current ideas and experimental media.

For the BMA, Oppenheimer has created two site-specific installations that cut through existing architecture and help unify a museum divided by thematic, historical, and physical barriers. W-120301, opens up unexpected lines of vision between the second and third floors of the Contemporary Wing, while P-010100 provides a slim window between the legendary Cone Collection and Contemporary Wing atrium. In both installations, Oppenheimer has inserted aluminum and reflective glass into standing walls, creating diagonal voids and providing unexpected views — of art works, museum visitors, and nearby galleries once hidden by occluding walls.

Of the two pieces, W-120301, with its three main vantage points, is the more dynamic. Viewed from the ‘Front Room’ Gallery, it appears as a floating black void, barely noticeable on the very high ceiling of the Front Room Gallery, which features rotating exhibits of by contemporary artists. However, if you stand directly below it W-120301 is transformed into a mirrored window, looking out on to a large Motherwell painting in the upstairs gallery and gallery-goers who appear upside down and much closer than they actually are, prompting unexpected eye contact and encounters.

The other main vantage point for W-120301 is a central landing at the center of the spiral staircase that connects upper and lower galleries. Built into a colossal window in the cement wall, the piece resembles the black bellows of a large-format camera, compressed into severe angles. This singular view delivers an upside down version of the downstairs gallery and its inhabitants, but the viewer cannot be seen. As you move past it, heading up or downstairs, the beveled planes of velvety matte aluminum emerge out of the window’s dark shadow, revealing a complex network of slanting geometrical planes.

Simple and demure by comparison, P-010100 is a slender oblique window composed from aluminum, glass, and existing museum architecture. It doesn’t attract as many visitors as the highly dramatic W-120301, but it is arguably a more ambitious piece primarily because of the significance of the museum barriers it broaches: The Cone Collection, the museum’s most beloved gallery, an unrivaled trove of 20th Century art, including the largest and most significant collection of works by Matisse in the world. Formerly separated from the Contemporary Wing by dark, heavy doors, and many museum visitors never bothered to cross its threshold. Any alteration to these cozy, contained galleries could easily be perceived as a distraction or, worse, a violation. Nuance and subtlety are of central importance for any architectural installation seeking to create communion.

From inside the Cone Collection, the dark, reflective glass of P-010100 frames unexpected slivers of the well-lit contemporary gallery, and a view of Robert Rauschenberg’s Johanson’s Painting, a lavish surface of decorative fabrics and an actual pillow, an updated take on opulence that resonates with several luxurious Matisse interiors nearby.

Both W-120301 and P-010100 manage to blend with their surroundings far more than one might expect; it’s difficult to fathom the extent of demolition and construction required to bring them to fruition. In an accompanying temporary exhibition– an installation of Oppenheimer’s meticulous, scaled models displayed in vitrines, a thick booklet of architectural drawings, a table covered with the artist’s inspirational reading materials and texts, and an interactive Ipad touch screen video interview with the artist — questions about the artist’s process, fabrication, and design process are answered. In the supplemental exhibit, the museum’s pride in commissioning these projects and an institutional desire to be as inclusive as possible with the public, are made evident.

Although Oppenheimer couches her structural interventions in the trappings and environs of fine art, it is obvious that she is more influenced by architecture than any other visual media. For a museum whose holdings have historically favored traditional media, site-specific works could have proven to be a blatant misstep. Oppenheimer’s strength as an artist lies beyond her uncanny ability to think through walls and envision visual juxtapositions among discrete spaces and bodies of work. She is able to consider the cusp between modern and contemporary works, architectural styles and conceptual schools of thought, successfully mining the existing strengths of the BMA’s disparate aesthetic offerings and uniting them in a complex and fortuitous juncture.

In W-120301 and P-010100, Oppenheimer continues a personal trajectory, where conflicting sensory information is exploited from ordinary architecture to yield dramatic, space-bending effects. Unlike so many contemporary works which demand an understanding of art historical trends and critical theory to experience them ‘properly,’ these structures ask viewers for nothing other than curiosity and engagement and rewards them with a compelling, unfolding dialogue that is both challenging and inclusive. Oppenheimer allows viewers directly into her thought process and it is a transformational experience where illusion and reality become interchangeable.

* Author Cara Ober is the Founding Editor at Bmoreart

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