For Lisa Oppenheim’s second solo show at Klosterfelde, the artist has presented three discrete groups of work in three separate rooms. Using techniques from photography’s early development together with shifts in subject and context, Oppenheim has invented images that reveal connections between past and present. In the first room, a single nineteenth-century photograph of the moon over the French countryside is displayed as the source for five silver-toned photographs, which the artist developed using available light from New York summer evenings.

In the second room, a group of photograms, Fish Scales, Véritable Hollandais, 2012, was made by taking fabric that had been mass-produced in the Netherlands, placing it directly on photographic paper, folding it, and then exposing it to light. The fabric imitates handmade batiks from Indonesia and highlights how cultural handicrafts and mechanical processes of production can overlap and blur. The results here are dark violet, abstract, moirélike patterned photographs.

New work from an ongoing project Smoke, 2011–, fills the last room. Digitally printed negatives with disparate sources––last year’s riots in London, Allied bombing raids over occupied France, and an early-twentieth-century volcanic eruption––depict clouds of smoke. Each work is exposed and solarized using light from a small culinary torch through which time and geographic location are conflated. In all of the works, the content and chosen photographic processes create a poetic displacement that proves to be intellectually provoking and emotionally engaging.

— David Rhodes