Lisa Oppenheim: Open Source
http://cmp.ucr.edu/exhibitions/oppenheim/

Lisa Oppenheim investigates the ways in which photographs are archived, historicized, and remembered. "Open Source" features three projects by this New York-based artist that emphasize the materiality of photographs and the public circulation of images.

In "Killed Negatives: After Walker Evans," Oppenheim accesses Evans' Depression-era negatives, now part of the Farm Security Administration photographic archive in the Library of Congress. Here, she turns her attention to those negatives deemed undesirable and "killed" when editors punched holes through them. Oppenheim treats these holes as spaces of possibility, and imagines contemporary ways to fill the historical gaps. Similarly, in "Damaged: Photographs from the Chicago Daily News 1902-1933," the artist gathers negatives from this early 20th-century newspaper that have been damaged over time. Printing only the flaws, cracks, and gaps, she then pairs the abstracted images with their original captions.

The third project, "The Sun Is Always Setting Somewhere Else," is a 35mm slideshow in which the artist holds photographs of sunsets up in front of the sun setting in New York. These seemingly banal sunsets-within-a-sunset take on a particular charge when we learn that they were made by soldiers stationed in Iraq. This piece, like the others on view, asks us to reconsider significant events, the photographs that attempt to record them, and all that lies beyond the photographic frame.