Artist’s Talk: Sarah Oppenheimer

Artist Sarah Oppenheimer discusses her work and ideas. Known for her elaborate reconfiguring of existing interior architectures, Oppenheimer examines how we perceive and move through space. Her installations often create disorienting or puzzling illusions that lead viewers to question what they believe they know about both their visual and their physical orientation within a building.

Oppenheimer’s Typology of Holes begins with the premise that the specificity of site can be extended from the particular to the general. This generality (for us, the inheritors and inhabitants of modern space) is the arrangement of spatial zones that abut and overlap in a mappable way. Holes alter this arrangement, functioning as a catalyst for the transformation of the perceptual experience of the occupant. The hole is an active blurring of the (architectural) distinction between zones.

Oppenheimer’s work has been shown nationally and internationally. Recent projects have been presented at the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Andy Warhol Museum and Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh), Art Unlimited at Art Basel, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the Saint Louis Art Museum, Skulpturens Hus (Stockholm), The Drawing Center (New York), and Sculpture Center (Long Island City). She is the recipient of the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award, and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship among other honors. Oppenheimer is a critic at the Yale University School of Art.

Cosponsored by Ohio State’s Department of Art.