Making art, building relationships

Artist Sarah Oppenheimer illuminates process for Rice architecture students

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

You never know what you’re going to see at Rice Gallery. This fall, you might not be sure what you’re looking at.

	Artist Sarah Oppenheimer, center, discusses the creative process with students from the Rice School of Architecture during a workshop at Rice Gallery.

Sarah Oppenheimer’s art tricks the eye with planes that seem out of place and holes that might be windows to the other side – or not.

The artist and Yale School of Art critic came to Rice University last week well in advance of her upcoming installation to teach students from the Rice School of Architecture about such manipulation of perception, and perhaps to learn a few new tricks herself.

Rice was ready for her. Like a Russian nesting doll, the gallery adjacent to Lovett Hall contained and concealed a miniature version of itself. Students who stepped behind the current exhibit, Andrea Dezsö’s fantastic “Sometimes in My Dreams I Fly,” were confronted with a walk-through mockup of the gallery’s exhibit space, lobby and exterior.

The mini-gallery served as a working model in service of the exhibit to come, a weird and wonderful wing-like structure by Oppenheimer that will break right through Rice Gallery’s boundaries and extend into the courtyard.

Oppenheimer’s exhibition will open Sept. 16, and fans will get to see the work progress beginning sometime in August. But last week, Rice architecture students got a taste of her style in a three-day workshop that addressed many of the questions she strives to answer with her art.

“Wormholes through the Curtain Wall” focused less on the holes – more like portals – in Oppenheimer’s work than the illusions that make them so otherworldly. The opportunities to manipulate light offered by Rice Gallery’s unique configuration – three “boxes” separated by glass, with a mixture of natural and artificial light – made the space irresistible to Oppenheimer, who was invited to Rice by gallery Director Kim Davenport nearly two years ago.

“This is a really unique place because of the glass planes,” Oppenheimer said. “Light becomes a much more complex problem when you try to control it through a transparent field. That seemed an extraordinarily unique feature of this place, and it has become increasingly articulated through this process.”

The artist set her students to work on day one, giving them clamp-on lamps to light the mockup’s boxes, separated by smoked (like the exterior windows) and clear (like the gallery wall) glass panels. They used light at many angles and intensities to make the glass reflective or transparent. Students on the other side of one or both walls were seen plainly or as ghostly figures, or not at all.

“The effects we ended up creating by accident or on purpose, and the amount of layering to a degree you could not believe, meant you couldn’t quite tell what was in what room,” said graduate student Christopher Ball. “You can simulate these effects to the best of your knowledge, but it’s never going to come close to actually seeing it.”

The students documented their work, which included a large, cardboard mockup of an Oppenheimer-inspired portal, through photos and computer models destined for the exhibition catalogue. Joining Ball were undergraduates Patricia Bacalao, Sid Richardson ’11, and Peter Stone, Wiess ’12; graduate students Edward Baer, Jason Pierce and Rebecca Sibley, and recent alums Alice Chai and Curt Gambetta, now events and publications coordinator at the school.

Oppenheimer, a Guggenheim Fellow and recent winner of the prestigious Rome Prize, was delighted by Rice’s commitment to the workshop, which Davenport suggested and gallery donors supported. Usually, she said, resources are reserved for construction of the installation itself, so she enjoyed the rare chance to share the creative process from the ground up.

“You have these really smart, really committed, really excited people, who are saying, ‘Yes, I want to be creative within that space.’ It’s really cool,” she said.

Teaching a workshop in advance of an exhibition was a first for Oppenheimer, who hopes to do more. “I see this as a massively rich archive to pull ideas from now,” she said.