Sarah Oppenheimer: Sensitive Machine

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DELMONICO BOOKS • D.A.P. NEW YORK
TRACY L. ADLER, EDITOR
Director’s Foreword and Acknowledgments 11 Tracy L. Adler In the Moment 17 Tracy L. Adler Documentation 37 At the Threshold 59 Seph Rodney Time-Lapse Documentation 66 Einfühlung and (E)motion 73 Suzanne Keen Documentation 81 Radiant Nodes 101 Sarah Oppenheimer Artist’s Acknowledgments 107 Contributors 109 Contents
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Above and preceding: Sarah Oppenheimer. Sensitive Machine, 2021. Installation view, Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art.

Director’s Foreword and Acknowledgments

What happens when we enter a space that is familiar yet transformed? There is a moment of hesitation, excitement, curiosity, and possibly even frustration. Imagine walking into a museum gallery that appears almost empty save for four monumental black horizontal beams of varying lengths and nine wall-like volumes that hover just above the floor and just below the ceiling. It defies our expectations of how a museum exhibition is supposed to appear and expands our notion of the art experience. Here at the Wellin Museum, we are interested in investigating the full range of possible artistic approaches through different types of exhibition-making. We encourage our audiences to question—and reflect on—their relational experience to museums, to the environment, and to each other through the art on view. As a teaching museum, the Wellin is ideally situated to explore how contemporary art supports our intellectual growth and influences our understanding of the world by questioning our foundational understanding of how we operate within it.

Over the twenty years I have known Sarah Oppenheimer, I curated her into exhibitions I organized in New York City and kept apprised of her evolving practice through regular studio visits. When the Wellin opened in 2012 and I relocated to Clinton to lead the institution, I began talking to her about doing a show together at the museum. I knew she would respond thoughtfully to the unique architecture and materiality of the Wellin Museum, which was designed by Machado Silvetti and was the first newly constructed building on Hamilton College’s historic campus since 1972, when Burke Library, designed by Hugh Stubbins and Associates, was built. In 2017, the stars aligned, and we began mapping out the show in earnest.

In the early planning stages, when Oppenheimer came to Hamilton College for her first site visit, we arranged for her to tour Hamilton’s letterpress, among other facilities, departments, and spaces on campus. Andrew Rippeon, who was overseeing the letterpress studio at the time, and the artist disassembled one of the presses to reveal the Möbius strip-like screw that drove the press’ trajectory. That was the spark of an idea that directly led to all of her work that followed.

As a senior critic at Yale University’s School of Art, Oppenheimer o en works collaboratively across disciplines. With assistance from the engineering department at Yale, she began developing screws based on what she discovered on the printing press at Hamilton to drive her own artworks. In early 2020, an iteration of this concept was realized in her solo museum show entitled N-01: Sarah Oppenheimer at Kunstmuseum Thun in Switzerland. What she learned about the functionality of the apparatus and screw evolved into the four artworks that make up the exhibition at the Wellin. That visit to Hamilton in 2017 entirely changed the trajectory of her work.

Oppenheimer’s work explores the intersection of art, architecture, and engineering, but on a foundational level, it is very sensory. It activates touch and sight. The viewer becomes an agent of their experience, meaning they literally drive the artworks themselves. Does the work exist at all without visitors to activate it? The work posits questions and leaves the door open to myriad responses. In that way, it provides a springboard for engaging many areas of

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Tracy L. Adler, Johnson-Pote Director, Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art

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