Landscapes - Juliette Jongma

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Lisa Oppenheim Landscapes
Solo exhibition
14 November - 9 January
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Lisa Oppenheim
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Landscapes
14 November 2015 - 9 January 2016
"Trees,
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like flowers, hills or clouds, have been contributing for
centuries to an idea which is commonly called nature. Sometimes curly
and low, sometimes thin and vertical, they have many names of which we
generally know a dozen, depending on where one lives: olive, poplar,
cedar, birch, or cypress, to name a few. It is no surprise that trees
have been the source of many human practices from building houses, to
making art and fuelling fires. Graceful oaks, for example, were depicted
in the Roman House of Livia, cushioned around the walls of a special
room, imprinting an elegant garden of illusion. Many centuries later
wood panels would be the ground where art would be practiced and, in
modern times, framed.
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In her new series Landscape Portraits, Oppenheim continues to work on
the encounter between what is represented and the process that makes
such representation possible. The methodology of the photogram excludes
the mimesis of the lens as there is no camera used. Rather objects are
placed directly on the surface of a light sensitive material and then
exposed to light. The photograms in this exhibition are made using very
thin slices of wood as photographic negatives. With this technique,
birch, cedar and the olive wood present themselves both as particular
trees and as unpredictable landscapes. The lines and curves imprinted on
the paper are reminiscent of scientific experiments, like microscopic
explorations or telescopic sightings of other cosmic bodies.
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Contained within frames made by the same wood type that they depict,
the Landscape Portraits produce a ghostly anthropomorphism of trees.
Images of uncharted territories alternate in one’s mind into lines which
may or may not indicate the age of the wood, At times the photograms are
psychedelic, seemingly revealing the ‘mind' of subjects they depict in a
black and white shadowy world. But what kind of subjectivity can
rootless trees have? In the process of making of this project, Oppenheim
realized that some of the slices of wood were ‘fake'. Instead of
transporting trunks over the vast ocean, wood vendors employ several
techniques of dying and cutting more readily available wood to look like
olive or other ‘exotic’ species. In the photograms depicting the ‘fake’
versions, Oppenheim combined both the wood intended to be represented
(cedar, for example) and the actual wood material (birch) into the
frames, thus further complicating a possibility of subjectivity.
""
Most landscapes are experienced in a matter-of-fact fashion. They
rehearse some form of construction, be it a carefully mastered garden or
a painting into which one gazes. The word landscape, popularized in the
16th century, comes from the Dutch ‘landschap’. Far from being a
contradiction connoting two different art historical categories,
‘landscape’ and ‘portraiture,’ Oppenheim’s Landscape Portraits produce a
hybrid and therefore different way of imagining each that is both as
unique as an individual tree and as general as the species from which it
emerges.
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Arnisa Zeqo
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Lisa Oppenheim (1975, New York, USA) is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY.
She is part of the group exhibition Photo Poetics in the Guggenheim
museum in New York that will open on the 20th of November 2015. In
January 2016 she will have a solo exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
in New York. Oppenheim has recently had solo exhibitions at FRAC
Champagne- Ardenne, Reims, FR (2015), Kunstverein in Hamburg, DE (2014),
Grazer Kunstverein, Graz, AU (2014), Lulu, Mexico City, MX (2014),
Kunstverein Gottingen, DE (2013). In 2014 Lisa Oppenheim won the AIMIA|
AGO Photography Prize and the Shpilman International Prize for
Excellence in Photography. Oppenheim
has also participated in
exhibitions at the Deutsche Bank Kunsthalle, Berlin, DE (2015)
Kunstverein in Hamburg, Germany, DE (2015), Kunstlerhaus: Halle fur
Kunst & Medien, Graz, AU (2015), The Getty Center, Los Angeles, USA
(2015), The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, IL (2014), Gagosian Gallery,
Beverly Hills, USA (2014), FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais, MASS MoCA, North
Adams, USA (2014) and Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA (2013).
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She is part of many public collections including The Belvedere, FRAC
Nord-Pas de Calais, FRAC Piemonte, FRAC Champagne-Ardrenne, The Israel
Museum, The J. Paul Getty Museum, The Guggenheim Museum, The Milwaukee
Art Museum , and the Museum of Modern Art.
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