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Numbers A New Work by Kristin Oppenheim San Francisco Museum of Modern Art August 17–November 24, 2002
Over the past decade, Kristin Oppenheim has been exploring the means by which we recall, revive, and share childhood memories and the emotions associated with them. Many of these memories and emotions are quite difficult to articulate, as they were acquired in a pre-linguistic state of being, or were too crude/unformed to be expressed in words. Oppenheim attempts to construct sculptural, experiential environments that preserve the rawness of those feelings or serve to trigger them in viewers’ minds. Though the artist’s investigation is by nature autobiographical and introspective, the universal character of the memories and emotions she mines points to a common terrain of shared experience. In many cases, an adult can be stimulated to access or recover long-dormant childhood above: After Dark My Sweet, 2000; Courtesy of the artist and 303 Gallery, New York. cover: Numbers (video still), 2002; Commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. memories by witnessing the experiences of a youth in his or her care; Oppenheim’s installation Numbers, with its close-ups of children’s hands playing a clapping game of the same name, suggests that artistic evocations of childhood can perform a similar function. Oppenheim’s art is characterized by its performative quality: early in her career, she often presented sound works in white rooms that were empty save for the physical presence of the audio equipment itself. She sang fragments of popular songs a cappella, or read poetry that she had written or found, and then presented recordings of them in these minimal settings. Her installations eventually came to incorporate theater lighting, as if to underscore the sense of a performance, yet one from which the artist/performer is physically removed. The naked voice best incarnates this strange tension between absence and presence, and it acts as a link between past and present, constructing a space of both personal memory and collective experience. Oppenheim carefully integrates the architectural setting into her artworks in order to maximize the impact of the audio component and foster the intimacy required to share the primal feelings in which she is interested. For a 2000 installation entitled The Eyes I Remember, Oppenheim literally sculpted the space, transforming the central part of a gallery 1 into a nearly ethereal maze of white scrim. While navigating the maze, the viewer was compelled to slow down in order to concentrate on a recording of whispered poetry. The maze also served as a passageway to an exhibition of Oppenheim’s photographs, which depicted outstretched arms, 1. The Eyes I Remember was on view at the 303 Gallery, New York, February–March 2000.
Page 4 and 5: their open hands reaching downward.

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