Artworks

For American Gothic (2023), a collaborative exhibition of works by Deborah Oropallo and Michael Goldin, the Media Room presented Deborah Oropallo’s WOLF (2019), WHITE AS SNOW (2016), and DIRTY (2021). Sound design: Jeremiah Franklin. 

WOLF, WHITE AS SNOW, and DIRTY build on Oropallo’s use of layering and accretion of image by placing it in the time-based medium of video. By limiting her cosplay images to classic, enduring fairy tale iconography, she collides online contemporaneity with myth and archetype, deepening and widening the sense in which these works are time based. Oropallo makes us watch as the works unfold over time, but also makes us keenly aware of the historic time to which they respond. The bonanza of found images of online catalogue models in costumes trace the development of an archetype (Moving Pictures: A Survey Exhibition of Works by Deborah Oropallo and Collaborators, the Schneider Museum of Art, 2024).