Lisa Oppenheim, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery

American multimedia artist Lisa Oppenheim, known for her evocative camera-less photography via the photogram and experimental films, is exhibiting a new series of works taking inspiration from natural woodgrains entitled Landscape Portraits at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York.

The artist places paper-thin slices of wood as negatives upon photographic paper, before exposing this using not the typical darkroom enlarger but instead her own firelight, and finally using a Solarol developer to produce a solarised effect. A seemingly simple concept, made intricate and complex and resulting in a series of mesmerising internal portraits of various kinds of trees.

Oppenheim has previously worked with archival sources such as that of London’s Imperial War Museum and the photo-sharing site Flickr to source images of industrial disasters and warfare, and so this exhibition marks a significant turn – however what remains is an interest in ageing, the natural versus the manmade, technology and science.

Meanwhile, Oppenheim will also show a series of Jacquard Weave works created at the Textiel Lab in the Netherlands, moving away from photography and instead reappropriating traditional methodology, and recording interrupted images which relate to ideas of early computing.

Lisa Oppenheim, 7 January – 20 February 2016, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York. For more information, visit www.tanyabonakdargallery.com

Credits
1. Installation shots from Lisa Oppernheim’s exhibition at Kunstverein Hamburg, Hamburg 27 September 2014 – January 2015.