Sarah Ortmeyer by Stephanie Cristello

Chess, eggs, and dessert.
bomb, June 11, 2015
My introduction to Ortmeyer’s work was through her exhibition KISH KUSH at Dvir Gallery, in Tel Aviv, in early 2014. After seeing the documentation online, I began a steady digital communication with Ortmeyer that has continued ever since. The show took on chess as performance—think Duchamp—in an over-the-top installation of life-size photos of female chess champions scattered throughout the gallery in a floor-to-ceiling array resembling centerfolds and pinups. The knights, queens, rooks, and pawns pictured in many of the images of these hottie grandmasters were tossed, strewn, held as props, and staged suggestively. Oversized marble pieces occupied the floor in clusters, sometimes in proximity to the images plastered on the wall, other times in independent huddles in the center of the space. Undermining the idea of strategy was at the center of Ortmeyer’s tactic. The best way to feature the absence of these female chess champions from the history of chess was, in this case, to attack the gendered intellectualism of the game in a way that was so sexualized, so explicitly objectified, that it posed an affront to the myth of male genius so readily performed by modernism.
 
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