Collaborative work with Andy Rappaport
Deborah Oropallo and Andy Rappaport: UPRISING
November 6 – December 23, 2021
Viewing Room Presentation: Katherine Vetne: All This Could Be Yours
Opening reception: Saturday, November 6 from 2 – 5pm
San Francisco, CA: Catharine Clark Gallery closes its Winter 2021 season with UPRISING, an exhibition of collaborative video and photomontage works by Deborah Oropallo and Andy Rappaport. Oropallo and Rappaport’s exhibition furthers their exploration of how we engage with public monuments and memory, while imagining how social justice movements and subsequent removal of racist and troubling monuments enables us to imagine spaces for collective healing as well as new narratives within these shared spaces.
The centerpiece of the exhibition is UPRISING (2021), an immersive 4K x 3-channel video installation. Set against a stormy and roiling sky, Oropallo and Rappaport’s video depicts over 200 felled and defaced monuments to America’s Confederacy, white supremacy, and global colonialism. Sourced from online reportage and news sites, UPRISING reimagines these historical statues as monuments that reflect the present moment: toppled and splattered with paint, a corrective gesture that the artists note “references the blood that stains the hands of a white hegemony that has used these statues as visual weapons that glorify the subjugation and discrimination of BIPOC populations worldwide.”
Oropallo and Rappaport write that “amongst this parade of bronzes swinging across a dark and foreboding sky are statues of European colonizers and slave traders that were removed by protesters and public authorities. Many are splashed with blood-red paint, marks that suggest the violent, racist histories that these statues ostensibly commemorate, as well institutional refusal to reckon with it. The video reimagines these historical statues as monuments to the present moment, in which these monuments – which for generations have stood to celebrate injustice – are reassembled as the raw materials for us to celebrate the collective and corrective actions of thousands.”
The 5-channel video REBELLION (2021), by comparison, depicts portraits of protestors from global demonstrations at sites from Hong Kong and Myanmar to Venezuela and Turkey. As the video loops to the sound of labored breathing through masks, viewers see protestors in colorful and even cartoonish masks and costumes that reference popular films about counterculture (such as The Hunger Games) as well as historical references to resistance figures such as Guy Fawkes. Oropallo and Rappaport note that “masks became symbols adopted from global popular culture by a new generation of activists reared on the internet.
Throughout, the protesters are surrounded by tear gas, imagined here as a toxic smoke screen. Tear gas is a chemical weapon banned in war designed to be impermanent – to leave no trace while rendering people unable to breathe. Police and military forces justify tear gas as a ‘peaceful poison’ with the intent to disperse crowds for civil disobedience. It evaporates from the scene, in a way that its damage becomes less apparent on the surface of the skin or the lens of the camera.”
The gallery’s Media Room features ONE WORLD (2021), an ambitious, 35-channel video on postcard sized monitors that depicts the construction and raising of One World Trade Center in the early 1970s to its destruction on 9/11. In memorializing the Twin Towers, Oropallo and Rappaport also reflect on collective trauma, and how we relate to loss, violence, and renewal in our built environments. Oropallo and Rappaport write that “growing up in proximity to the Hudson River, we watched and then visited the construction of One World Trade Center during high school, witnessing it emerge as a hated monument to capitalism, transformed through its violent erasure into a lost monument to collective resilience and fortitude.”
Oropallo and Rappaport’s exhibition opens on Saturday, November 6 with a reception from 2 – 5pm, with social distancing protocols in effect.
Upcoming Exhibitions and Presentations:
November 29 – December 4, 2021:UNTITLED, Art Miami Beach featuring works by Jen Bervin, Lenka Clayton, Ana Teresa Fernandez, Nina Katchadourian, Bradley McCallum, Stephanie Syjuco
January 8 – February 12, 2022: Marie Watt |Companion Species (Calling Back, Calling Forward)
February 19 – March 26, 2022: Wanxin Zhang | Solo Exhibition
April 2 – May 7, 2022: Masami Teraoka and Al Farrow | Solo Exhibitions
DEBORAH OROPALLO AND ANDY RAPPAPORT began their artistic collaboration with the 2018 exhibition Dark Landscapes for a White House. Their artistic partnership is ongoing, and their collaborative work so far constitutes more than a dozen projects and large-scale installations. Their installations have been included in Digital Nature II at the Los Angeles Arboretum, Pasadena, California; Natural Discourse at the Sagehen Creek Field Station, near Lake Tahoe, California; and FLIGHT at The Triton Museum of Art, Santa Clara, California. FLIGHT was also exhibited in 2020 at the Schneider Museum of Art at Southern Oregon University, Ashland. In 2020, FLIGHT was acquired by 21c Museum Hotels, Louisville, Kentucky for its permanent collection. In 2021, Oropallo and Rappaport’s collaborative video work, RECKONING (2020), was exhibited in the major biennial Converge45 in Portland, OR.
DEBORAH OROPALLO (American, born in Hackensack, New Jersey, 1954) received a BFA from Alfred University and an MA/MFA from the University of California at Berkeley. Originally trained as a painter, Oropallo incorporates mixed media techniques, including photomontage, video, computer editing, printmaking, and painting into her practice. Whether still or moving images, the resulting works bear traces of the distortions that evolve or remain from the image manipulation. Her composite works layer visual sources producing dense interplay between time, place, form, and content.
Her exhibition history includes monographic exhibits at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, California, the Boise Art Museum, Idaho, Montalvo Art Center, Saratoga, California, the San Jose Museum of Art, California; and work in exhibits at the Whitney American Art Museum (Whitney Biennial), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC, and The Jewish Museum, New York, New York. Oropallo’s work is in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, California, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York, and the Anderson Collection at Stanford University, California.
Oropallo’s video work titled Smoke Stacked (2017) is in the collection of the Nevada Museum of Art as a part of an ongoing initiative to collect and support works operating at the intersection of art and the environment. Oropallo’s work is the subject of two monographs: POMP (2009) published by Gallery 16, and How To, published by the San Jose Museum of Art. She is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Award, a Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation, the Engelhard Award and two grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Oropallo lives in West Marin, California and has been represented by Catharine Clark Gallery since 2013.
ANDY RAPPAPORT(American, born in New York, New York, 1957) has had a nearly 50-year long involvement with music. sound, photography, and technology. His experience ranges from fronting rock-and-roll bands, to performing as a singer-songwriter, to designing and building recording studios and equipment. Rappaport’s collaboration with Deborah Oropallo on the video works for Dark Landscapes for a White House (2018) marked his first foray into music for moving images since scoring student films in the 1970s and draws on his experiences at that time with some of the earliest commercially available music synthesizers. Subsequent work has also drawn on Rappaport’s experience with photography and video technology to explore how images, motion, sound, time, and space can combine both conceptually and in presentation. Rappaport’s collaborative work with Oropallo is represented by Catharine Clark Gallery. His photographs are in several private collections.
