Sheryl Oppenheim

Small and Slow
December 1- January 12, 2019
Reservoir Art Space
659 Woodward Ave, Ridgewood, NY 11385

“Computer-generated ‘virtual worlds’ are as actual as can be, for they are the product of programs written to produce these worlds. Looking out the window is a better way to come into contact with the virtual, because when you look out the window, your perception may bring something into being that never existed that way before.”

-Laura U. Marks, Enfoldment and Infinity

Deanna Evans Projects is pleased to announce Small and Slow, a solo exhibition of Sheryl Oppenheim’s recent paintings. These new works have roots in Oppenheim’s seven-year old practice of making marbled paper. In marbling, nature takes control of some of the creative process, and results in images that resemble what is seen in the natural world, from a neuron in the body, to rock formations, to outer space. The marblings are created quickly and spontaneously, and filled with so much information that to look at them is to be overwhelmed by an extremely detailed but cohesive whole.

The six paintings in this exhibition, from 2017 and 2018, are all observational paintings of marbling. Small and slow, Oppenheim’s paintings veer away from recreating the awe-inspiring beauty of marbling, instead depicting the strange shapes and moments that can be found in a section of only a few square inches. Working from observation was also a way for Oppenheim to interrogate her paranoia that her devotion to her phone has shortened her attention span and changed the way she sees. The marbled image has become increasingly familiar to her as she has painted from the same small section of marbling for nearly two years. With each new painting of the same image, new ways of representing it emerge, as if on their own, just as the marbling itself was formed by forces always just beyond her control.

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Sheryl Oppenheim was born in 1983, raised in Orlando, FL, and lives in New York City. She is a painter and maker of illegible books, an idea she first became interested in after seeing the work of Bruno Munari. Her work has been exhibited at the Cranbrook Museum of Art (Bloomfield Hills, MI), Sadie Halie Projects (Minneapolis), Florence Loewy (Paris), and in New York at BAM, Small Editions, DCTV, Ortega Y Gasset, and Silent Barn. Her artist books are in a number of public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Watson Library, the Walker Art Center, the Brooklyn Museum, the New York Public Library’s Spencer Collection, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Her artist books are published with Small Editions. She also collaborates with the writer and poet Janelle Poe.