Zhiyuan Yang “A Family of Three” and Dennis Oppenheim “Feedback: Parent-Child Projects from the 70s”
Shirley Fiterman Art Center (BMCC)
This event has ended.
Beijing-born, Brooklyn-based artist Zhiyuan Yang explores identity, family structure, and the profound affect that government and social policy has on both. In the three series of works presented here, Yang examines not only relationships between political legislation and family, but also the tensions between emerging feminist politics and patriarchal traditions. In a collaborative process with her parents, Yang uses performance, photography, and video to challenge normative definitions of gender and ethnicity, and to complicate social structure. Through masquerade, role play, staged poses, costumes, and humor, her photographs express an awkward familial intimacy and construct alternatives to social and familial interaction.
Known for his Land Art work, the pioneering American artist Dennis Oppenheim moved from large-scale Earthworks to contained works with and about his body. These performance works included explorations of identity and temporality and then extended to include his family. He began making work with his wife and three children in 1970, in what became series of conceptual projects that are the focus of this show.
The exhibition brings together a selection of video and photo documentation of the performances. In 2-Stage Transfer Drawing. (Advancing to a Future State)…. (Returning to a Past State)., 1971, the artist and his son stand behind, and then in front of each other. Oppenheim uses a marker to draw on the skin of his son’s back and Erik interprets the sensation, transferring it to the wall (Advancing to a Future State). Oppenheim then then interprets the feeling of Erik’s drawing on his back, transferring it to the wall (Returning to a Past State). In using his father’s body, Erik moves forward in time, and Oppenheim moves backward in time using his son’s body, making a poignant statement about family relations, projection, desire and the nature of the act of drawing itself.
Media
Schedule
from November 20, 2019 to February 01, 2020
In Conversation: Wednesday, December 11, 6PM Amy Oppenheim, Mindi Reich-Shapiro, and Zhiyuan Yang
Opening Reception on 2019-11-20 from 18:00 to 20:00