White Room: Oona Stern

Oona Stern’s work straddles the divisions between art and architecture, sculpture and drawing, two- and three-dimensional forms. Most often she creates site-specific architectural pieces whose buildings materials have been displaced or manipulated in some way. Past interventions have included the substitution of typical materials with the unexpected, such as in curtains made of stone and floor planks made of carpet. In her White Room, Stern presents “Drawn,” an installation composed of color copies of the artist’s drawings of roof shingles, cut and sculpted vinyl siding, and paving stones shaped from thin strips of carpet. The piece, which links the walls and floor, suggests a greatly abstracted house and garden. Another piece installed outside the gallery on Horatio Street similiarly reimagines the surface of a steel roll-down gate through enlarged color reproductions of the artist’s drawings. Stern is a graduate of the School of Visual Arts. Her work has been included in group shows at White Columns (Wall Work, 1998), the Islip Art Museum, The Drawing Center, and Feature, among many other places. She has had solo shows in Stuttgart and New York.