Martin Oppel appropriates, re-creates, and depicts the underused and overlooked in a quest for ontological fixity at a moment when culture is anything but stable. This necessitates taking a long view, and he trains on man-made objects and social mores the same gaze that Robert Smithson, whose work Oppel has referenced directly, fixed upon natural forces. If Smithson's lens was geological, uncovering a tendency toward entropy in nature, Oppel's is anthropological or sociological, highlighting the pendular swings of civilizational customs.

Each object in Oppel's oeuvre has its own internal logic, making for a visually heterogeneous output: For example, in "Soul Fire," his first solo exhibition, a sculpture made in the form of Coatlicue, the Aztec goddess of earth and fire, hung directly opposite a large-scale painting of a modern-day rock stage. The sculpture looks as if made of stone, and is suspended, logically, by sturdy rock climbing rope; in reality, it is a pi–ata made of painted paper, a fact that undermines both its sculptural and iconographic gravitas. The painting, one of a series, is flatly rendered, the sources of light dilated, as if mediated by lens or screen; there are no human figures, either on stage or visible in the audience. It depicts a space of pure potential, waiting to be invested with meaning by the thousands of fans who will bathe in the aura imparted by (temporary) deities that will stand upon it. It is only by asking broad questions that one can trace the sweeping arcs necessary to connect the two. How has ritual been supplanted by spectacle? Has a sense of primacy, whether in the form of prayers offered to a god carved in stone or even the delight of a traditional children's game, been replaced by mediated experience? How does collectively generated meaning impact the individual?

Oppel's practice is reflexive, equally concerned with what ways art does or does not begin to answer these questions as with raising the questions themselves. "A space of pure potential" describes not only the brightly lit arena stage, but also the empty studio, the young artist's career, and, at least now, the city of Miami, where Oppel lives and works and which has mutated ever more rapidly into an internationally recognized art center. One could argue that Oppel's swift evolution as an artist has mirrored the gold-rush transformation of his environment, the liminal spaces of which he heroically transfigured in earlier paintings. (Rarely does construction dust and pollution look so exalted.) The objects he made a few years ago were largely one-offs, meant to crystallize an idea and be placed into productive juxtaposition with unlike others; Oppel necessarily created his own context. "Soul Fire" still, to a certain extent, approximated (visually at least) a group exhibition, what with its sculptures made of diverse materials and paintings of seemingly unrelated subjects. But Oppel is now a more patient artist, honing each idea across a series of works, confident that context will arise organically.

A shorthand description of one of the first of these series would ask you to imagine what Richard Artschwager would have made had he stayed with Smithson in 1969 at Hotel Palenque. These low, beautifully crafted wood sculptures simultaneously evoke Artschwager's furniturelike Formica-and-wood works, the Mayan temples that rise out of Palenque's lush greenery, and the packing crates ubiquitous in gallery storerooms. They display attentiveness to that which is often disregarded (support structures for the "temple of commerce"; indigenous cultures), appreciation of the thin line between abstraction and representation, and respect for both materials and craftsmanship.

They also, obliquely, respond to some of the questions listed above, implying that it is man-made objects that have replaced religion (and other immaterial ameliorative structures). Taken together with Coatlicue Pi–ata (2005), Soil Cinders (2003), which are cement blocks cast from earth, and Evergreen (2003), a manicured pile of plastic leaves, one could even argue that Oppel no longer has faith in a nature-culture dichotomy. Everything is now in the realm of man, and of manufacturing: objects are, to a certain extent, interchangeable and endlessly reproducible. By a quasi-alchemical process dependent largely on considerateness for what he works with, Oppel reinvests these items with some of their lost uniqueness, finding the memorable aspects of what would otherwise be passed over.