Lisa Oppenheim - The American Colony

In her new exhibition, The American Colony, Oppenheim highlights her unique ability to translate historical subjects and early methods of photo-making through contemporary experimental darkroom processes. In these new works, the artist explores stereoscopy in particular, a technique popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries for its pseudo-3D effect in which two images of the same object are taken from slightly different angles and then are optically merged through a viewing device,. In Wildflowers of Palestine and Religious Paintings, she exposes both sides of a stereoscopic negative on a single piece of paper creating a new double image not visible in the original stereographic views. In Wall to stop Locusts, Oppenheim reframes a series of stereoscopic images of a zinc wall commissioned by Ottoman authorities in the Judean desert in 1915 to prevent swarms of locusts from desceniding into the farmland surrounding Jerusalem as well as the city itself . In these images, the line between stereoscopic halves as well as damage that time has wrought on the original negatives become structural elements in the composition, creating a visual barrier between images. Through this reframing, Oppenheim draws a subtle relationship between contemporary politics and these images from a little remembered but devastating plague of locusts.