Sarah Oppenheimer at P.P.O.W

In her first solo exhibition at this gallery, a season opener, Sarah Oppenheimer played up the drama of entrance. Using standard sheets of plywood cladding that she bent like heavy paper, Oppenheimer transformed the space literally wall to wall. A waist-high, barrel-shaped, plywood-covered barrier near the front door shunted viewers to a narrow corridor, one wall of which was punctured midway by that barrier, here revealed as a hollow tube whose terminus framed part of a usually obscured window to the street. The payoff was a bracing glimpse of real life in what is otherwise a hermetically sealed interior, but Oppenheimer held it at arm's length--the plywood-covered column both let you see fresh air and sky (and perhaps a pigeon or two) and kept them at a distance, a surprisingly powerful visual tease.

Rounding the corner, one entered a small, windowless, plywood-lined room whence a similar tube led to the gallery's storage area, also normally concealed, and under these circumstances preternaturally appealing. The carpentry of all this was clean, efficient and fairly obvious, though clearly the work involved was prodigious. Similarly, the seemingly transparent logic of the configuration actually produced considerable perplexity (it took a long moment to figure out, when you'd turned the second corner, why that window to the street wasn't there).

In the gallery's back room, the construction process was annotated, without really being explained, by a series of photographs of constituent modules and a chart classifying the various forms they take. The installation's title, 554-5251, is thus revealed (with the help of press material) as naming its "set fold reference number." This collateral work stresses the everyman nature of Oppenheimer's low-cost materials and DIY process, and suggests she sees herself in the artist-as-blue-collar-worker tradition with which Gordon Matta-Clark and Robert Smithson identified.

A 1999 Yale graduate, Oppenheimer already has a solid exhibition history, of work both conceptual/performative (hiring contractors to redo a wall over and over again; observing commuters' newspaper folding habits) and, more interesting, sculptural/ phenomenological (reconfiguring interiors, as here). In the second category, her predecessors include space-shapers like Robert Irwin and James Turrell as well as Matta-Clark and Smithson. Closest in spirit to 554-5251 was Olafur Eliasson's installation at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in 2000, which similarly transformed the space and, most pertinent, included a plywood tunnel that led straight to the great outdoors. Still, Oppenheimer's installation was potent not least for its freshness, and for the muscular way it elbowed viewers to attention, forcing a brightened experience of an otherwise unremarkable space--and of the long-running comedy that is gallery-going.

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