Jeffrey Opp (United States) constructs photographs, hand-bound art books, and perceptual text-and-image artworks. In a search for new methods to ‘read the landscape,’ Opp investigates the dynamics of landscape and economics, including the manipulation of its effects on our senses and the limits of vernacular aesthetics based on our assumptions and what these concepts mean to us. His photographs are characterized by the exploration of everyday places in an atmosphere of middle class yearning in which recognition plays an important role.

Rather than presenting an illusion, an immanent reality is presented for interpretation. By demonstrating the omnipresent lingering of a ‘fully-commercialized world,’ he creates with common, recognizable elements, an unprecedented situation in which the viewer must confront the conditioning of their own perception and must reconsider their position in relation to the landscape. By taking elements from daily life as subject matter while commenting on the everyday aesthetic of middle class values, his compositions reference photographic formalism as well as the left-wing democratic movement as a form of resistance against the idealism and ‘logic’ of the capitalist market system.

His artistic construction establishes a link between the landscape’s reality and that imagined by its conceiver by inviting the viewer to ‘feel their way into’ the artwork. There they confront concrete questions that determine the reality of our surroundings and, by extension, factors that control how we live our lives. Opp demonstrates how life extends beyond its own conceptual limits and he often tells a story about the Material effects of global cultural interaction. He challenges the binaries we continually construct between our own desire and dearth while urging us to evaluate the systems that create those sentiments.

Jeffrey Opp currently lives and works in the Portland, Oregon area.