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Geof Oppenheimer
Anthems (still), 2011
HD Video, 4
minutes, 42 seconds
Courtesy of Ratio 3, San
Francisco
GEOF
OPPENHEIMER
Inside us all there is a part that
would like to burn down our own house
October
28th - December 10th, 2011
Opening
reception: Friday, October 28th, 2011, 6-8pm
Ratio 3 is pleased to present
Inside us all there is a part that would like to burn down our
own house, a solo show of new work by Geof
Oppenheimer, October 28th to December 10th,
2011.
Working with diverse media, Oppenheimer takes the
formal manifestation of civic value as his subject,
interrogating the ways in which political and social
structures are encoded in images and objects. It is a practice
situated at the intersection of art and politics, but in such
a way that neither art nor politics is reducible to the other
term.
Included in this exhibit is a new suite of
sculptures, collectively titled Modern Ensembles. Working with
a pyro-technician formally with the Disney Corporation,
Oppenheimer developed a series of custom made charges of
various explosive chemicals that where detonated within the
voids of ballistic Plexiglas cubes. Having been set off, the
detonations leave a residue of the explosion within each cube.
It is an aesthetic of violence — a violent history but one
that is unmoored from context to become free-floating
signifier. This disconnect between violence and context
renders the experience of violence abstract as it is freed
from politics and morality. With a seductive beauty, these
sculptures conflate the traditional ideologies of minimalist
sculpture with notions of the corporeal pull of violence that
pervades our contemporary world.
A
suite of five pigment prints titled Social Failure and Black
Signs will be on view as part of the exhibition as well. This
project was a culmination of a yearlong research project
undertaken at the Special Collections Research Center center
at the University of Chicago into the history of twentieth
century political interviews. The prints feature excerpts from
interviews with political luminaries such as Castro, McNamara,
and Reagan, where they discuss the failures in their own
ideological systems. The resulting texts, removed from context
and held aloft by a hand model become a kind of broadcast as
well as poetry of fallibility.
Also
on exhibit is a high definition video, titled Anthems . This
four minute and forty-two second video is an investigation
into social mapping and pattern-making. For centuries, the
pageantry of military spectacle has been an umbrella for
people to come together under one body politic. The drum core
is a holdover from this cultural history. In the video, a
confrontational situation, both visually and sonically, is set
up between groupings of musicians marching in formation on
screen. Shifting formation, and with superimposed images, the
marchers are simultaneously playing four different national
anthems. The audio tracks of the performance are highly edited
and mixed so that the sounds of the individual anthems are
lost in a wall of sound. Over the course for the video the
sound and imagery build to a crescendo of incomprehension and
then fades out to pure abstract blur that is devoid of any
kind of representational mark. It is a violent imposition of
different social structures upon one another. Produced with
the drum and marching core of Rickover Naval Academy in
Chicago, Illinois, Anthems was commissioned by SITE, Santa Fe
for the exhibition Agitated Histories.
Geof Oppenheimer was born in
Washington, D.C. in 1973. He received his BFA from the
Maryland Institute, College of Art (1996) and his MFA from
University of California, Berkeley (2001). He has exhibited at
The Project, New York (2006 and 2008), Aspen Art Museum
(2010), LAX><ART (2009), PS1 Contemporary Arts Center
(2006), The Contemporary Museum, Baltimore (2011), and SITE
Santa Fe (2011). He currently lives and works in Chicago,
where he is an Associate Professor of Practice in the
Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago. This
is his first solo exhibition at Ratio 3.
RATIO 3
1447
Stevenson Street
San
Francisco, CA 94103
T: +1
4158213371
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