MUSEUMS: Sarah Oppenheimer: Sensitive Machine
Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College
08.30.2021
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“How do you encourage touch without instructing? And what does it mean to set up the conditions by which a person understands that touch is not just permissible, but is sort of the key to unlocking the whole world?” — Sarah Oppenheimer
Sarah Oppenheimer: Sensitive Machine invites visitors to collaboratively realign and reconfigure the Wellin’s Dietrich Exhibition Gallery. Visitors touch and turn four hollow beams, setting in motion a relay of spatial cause and effect. Columns split and slide, creating new sightlines, while light fixtures rise and fall, shifting the radiance of the gallery. Conceptually, the work explores how our actions—both individually and communally—shape the spaces we inhabit, and how those spaces embody a constant state of flux. The work mobilizes group dynamics and engages the joy of improvised learning, bringing awareness to the collaborative experience of inhabited architecture.
The exhibition is curated by Tracy L. Adler, the Johnson-Pote Director of the Wellin Museum of Art, and comprises four newly designed “instruments” that build on Oppenheimer’s recent exhibitions at Kunstmuseum Thun, Switzerland; and Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh.
In this film by Brett Novak, Oppenheimer discusses her work from her studio in New York City and shares the process of developing this exhibition.
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