When the Sun is Done

Exhibition Dates:
January 17 - February 28, 2025

Opening Reception:
Friday, January 17, 2025, 5:00-9:00pm

Artist Talk & Publication Release:
Wednesday, February 26, 2025, 6:00-7:30pm

Rivalry Projects is thrilled to present When the Sun is Done, a solo exhibition of new works by Buffalo-based artist John Opera. The exhibition will be on view from January 17 - February 28, 2025.

When the Sun is Done meditates on the threshold between visibility and vanishing, drawing inspiration from philosopher Jean-François Lyotard’s notion of “solar collapse”—the eventual dissolution of the sun’s energy and the cosmic shifts that follow. Here, diffraction patterns and portraits are presented side by side, evoking a realm where light slips beyond control and images dissolve into something more uncertain. Yet despite this darker conceptual framework, the works radiate a sense of vitality and visual warmth, resisting a purely pessimistic reading of entropy and change.

At the heart of the exhibition are montaged images of diffraction patterns, captured through custom-built photographic apparatus, shot on film, and printed using the gum bichromate process on canvas. This method imparts a painterly tactility and material presence to each image. These intricate visual fields, formed as light interacts with physical obstacles, suggest a universe in flux. Alongside them are a series of new portraits that share similar fractal rhythms, indicating that human identity can be refracted and remade in tandem with cosmic phenomena. Some of the works’ titles carry autobiographical references, serving as personal anchors amid cosmic speculation.

Together, the pieces in When the Sun is Done create an environment where subject, light, and matter continuously meld and separate. Viewers are invited to acknowledge the delicacy and interconnectedness of being while encountering a brightness that transcends the initial premise of collapse. In this space, uncertainty becomes a source of imaginative possibility.

WORKS

Installation Images

Coming soon…

About the Artist

John Opera (b. 1975, Buffalo, NY) combines a deep interest in the visual characteristics of natural and scientific phenomena with a rigorous experimental approach to the techniques and apparatuses by which photographs have been defined and produced. Opera’s recent exhibitions include: DOCUMENT (Lisbon), The Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago), Paris Photo(Paris), June Art Fair (Basel), Rhode Island Center for Photography (Providence), Mrs. Gallery (New York), Carriage Trade (New York), Foreland Campus for Contemporary Art (Catskill), and the Cleveland Museum of Art (Cleveland).

His work has been the subject of a two-person exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and is featured in the second volume of MP3, co-published by Aperture and the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago). His work is part of the permanent collections of the DePaul Museum of Art (Chicago), the Burchfield-Penney Art Center (Buffalo), and the Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago), Minneapolis Institute of Art (Minneapolis), among other institutions. Opera’s work has been reviewed by Artforum, Artforum.com, The New Yorker, Flash Art, The Chicago Tribune, The Miami Rail, The Buffalo News, and Chicago Artist Writers, among other publications. He lives and works in Buffalo, NY.