Dennis Oppenheim "Salutations to the Sky"
The Gabarron Foundation Carriage House Center for the Arts
This event has ended.
Dennis Oppenheim (1938-2011) exhibited his work in museums and galleries worldwide since 1968. During four decades his practice has employed all available methods; writing, action, performance, video, film, photography, and installation. He has used mechanical and industrial elements, fireworks, common objects and traditional material, materials of the earth, sky, his own or another's body. He has created works for interior, exterior, and public spaces.
The close working relationship and friends hip between the Dennis Oppenheim studio and The Gabarron Foundation was initiated in 1997 with "Stage Set for a Film<" commissioned fro Dennis Oppenheim by the City of Valladolid (Spain), completed in 1998. The studio and the foundation continued to work together on multiple projects between 1997 and 2011, fostered by mutual understanding. The Foundation is please to present the most recent project, "Salutations to the Sky."
The exhibition at the Carriage House is three projects which focus on the artist's use of the intangible connection, earth to sky. This connection was alluded to often, beginning with Land Art. In "Annual Rings," (1968) the schemata of annual tree rings cut in snow is severed by the river forming the boundary between the US and Canada. This work could be considered the definition of site-specificity. With "Salutations," inscriptions are cut in land adjoining a river in Sacramento, California, though any river with adjoining flat land is a potential site. Both works are experienced through photography, the first realized but temporal, the second unrealized, existing in proposal form. It is in aerial photography, which places the viewer in the sky and looking at the earth, by which one best experiences these works. The second work in this exhibition is photo documentation of the project, "Formula Compound, A Combustion Chamber, An Exorcism." In this work the artist made the connection between earth and sky using lines of light. Through projection, the sculpture is drawing in air, it becomes a fireworks projection machine.
Media
Schedule
from December 16, 2011 to February 15, 2012
Opening Reception on 2011-12-15 from 18:00 to 20:00
RSVP required. 212-573-6968 x 11 and/or rsvp@gabarronfoundation.org