Sarah Oppenheimer

The titles of Oppenheimer’s works are generated from a numerical typology.[7][22] Each digit in a title tracks transactions and flow between spatial zones, and together, form a key to the orientation of the work within the built environment. Writer Alexander Galloway likens Oppenheimer’s typology to bitwise operations commonly used in computer architecture and binary arithmetic.[4]

In early exhibitions at The Drawing Center (2002) and Queens Museum (2004), Oppenheimer explored the interdependence of spatial navigation and interior architecture.[23][24] Mutable wall panels were reconfigured in the museum space while navigational research was conducted on test subjects monitored under controlled conditions (e.g., Hallway, 2002).[25][26] In the latter 2000s, Oppenheimer reconfigured the boundaries between exhibition spaces, installing apertures that displaced views within and outside galleries (e.g., Saint Louis Art Museum, 2008; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, 2009).[27][28] 610-3356 (Mattress Factory, 2008) employed a roughly seven-foot-long hole in museum's fourth floor which tunneled down and out a third-floor window to enable a view outside the building.[6][22][29][30]

Sarah Oppenheimer, 610-3356, Plywood and existing architecture, fourth floor opening dimensions: 84" × 16", Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, 2008.

In D-33 (P.P.O.W., 2012) and 33-D (Kunsthaus Baselland, 2014), Oppenheimer modified the boundary between three contiguous rooms, inserting a pair of slanting openings at the spaces' corners.[3][31][7][32] The openings united, separated and altered the interconnected environments, offering shifting views and light conditions. Edged with bands of dark, matte aluminum cladding, they recalled the drawn lines and shapes of hard-edge geometric abstraction.[3][7][32] The New York Times's Roberta Smith described D-33 as "a new variation on the empty-gallery-as-art," which combined graphic punch and Caligari-esque Expressionism to torque space "in ways both apparent and mysterious."[31] W-120301 (Baltimore Museum of Art, 2012) was Oppenheimer's first permanent work in a museum.[6][19] It involved three precise, four-sided cutouts—in the ceiling of a second-floor gallery, in the wall of a third-floor gallery, and in the wall of an adjacent rotunda—that formed a Y-like shape opening into a volume embedded within the floors and walls.[2][33] She arranged the aperture to create unexpected "shortcut" views of spaces located within a few feet of one another, but experientially remote.[2][6][4]

Oppenheimer extended her engagement with passageways and apertures to include movable and manually activated partitions utilizing the concept of the "switch"—devices or junctures that modulate or articulate movement and change, such as open/closed, reflection/transparency, continuity/separation.[8][5][18] S-399390 (Mudam, 2016) featured two inhabitable glass passageways that repeatedly changed position in the museum's Grand Hall according to an orchestrated scheme, modifying visitor movement, sightlines and perceptions of the space.[8]

Sarah Oppenheimer, S-337473, Aluminum, steel, glass and existing architecture, Total dimensions variable. Installation view: Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, 2017.

During a two-year residency at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Oppenheimer developed a human-powered apparatus, the biased-axis rotational frame mounting system, for which she received a U.S. patent.[4][34][35][36] It was used in three locations: S-281913 (Perez Art Museum Miami, 2016), S-337473 (Wexner Center for the Arts, 2017), and S-334473 (Mass MoCA, 2019).[17][4][37][38] Each work featured two open glass volumes suspended in midair between thick steel tubes anchored to the floor and ceiling. Viewers set the volumes in slow rotating motion around a diagonal axis. The movement initiated a sequence of unexpected sightlines, thresholds, pathways and choreographies between artwork, viewer and built environment.[10][37][17][18] Laurent Stalder wrote that Oppenheimer's later work "fundamentally challenges the conception of architecture as a solid and durable construction, proposing instead a conception of architecture as a controlled and controllable environment."[18]

N-01 (Kunstmuseum Thun, 2020) featured a dynamic exhibition system of mechanically interconnected thresholds which when set in motion changed the position of one another.[39][11] Describing N-01, Soyoung Yoon wrote, "Each component of the work links to the other, communicates with each other, and the challenge is to see ourselves as also a component within this series of linkages—a complex, apparently-disjunctive series, which we learn to see as a whole."[39]