ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Opening reception: Friday May 4, 6 – 9 pm

Harris Lieberman is pleased to announce Lisa Oppenheim’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. In three distinct but related series, photographs weave together historic and modern references. Through processing, repetition and performance, the source material is abstracted into allusive compositions.

The main gallery will feature iterations of the series Leisure Work and Smoke. Leisure Work, in which folds of antique lace multiply in successive prints, derives its title from the classification of lace-making in an early twentieth century Belgian census. As part of her studio work, folding the lace is a step in a performance and occupation for Oppenheim while also a gesture to the history of photography and William Henry Fox Talbot’s early experiments with lace calotypes.

In Smoke, cropped photographs of smoke rising from riots or volcanoes, among other fires, become a screen through which photographic paper is exposed and then re-exposed by a torch, producing a solarized image. Fire generates the content and the print, collapsing distinctions in medium, time and context. The images are moored solely by their titles, which are drawn from the original photographs’ captions. The rear gallery will feature a series of the night sky that further explores the reciprocal relationships found throughout the exhibition. Based on a late nineteenth century photograph tracing the lunar path, Oppenheim’s modern image transfer is developed by moonlight.

Lisa Oppenheim’s work was recently featured at Performa 11, the 2012 Marrakech Biennial and ICA London. In March she co-curated Eyeballing, a film program screened on New York’s High Line. Oppenheim’s work has been exhibited at the Guggenheim Museums, New York, Berlin and Bilbao; Tate, St. Ives; the New Museum, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Houston; the Swiss Institute, New York and the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA. She is a graduate of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and received an MFA in 2002 from Bard College. From 2004 to 2005 she was a fellow at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam.