Buffalo Spree: January 2025

When The Sun Is Done

In Section On The Town / Photography

New work from John Opera at Rivalry Projects

by Meagan Walker Doxtad

JOHN OPERA’S exhibition, When the Sun is Done, features new work born from innovative experiments with alternative photographic printing that blends elements of photography and painting. Opera is an associate professor and head of the photography program at UB.

"Over the last ten years or so, the work has shifted away from a photograph on paper more into the realm of materiality," Opera says. "For me, that’s been a way to start a conversation between photography and painting. Those two mediums have a long, sordid history. I’m interested in how photographs are supposed to be accurate fragments of the world, and how paintings can kind of be a world unto themselves."

As an academic and an artist, Opera’s research centers on material investigation. For this body of work, he employed a gum bichromate process, which combines the light-sensitive compound potassium dichromate and gum arabic, the main ingredient in watercolor. Typically the process takes to paper, but Opera opts for canvas.

But the how of it is only half the story. The exhibition’s title references a thought experiment by French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard. "He uses this idea of solar collapse to symbolize the ultimate kind of unfathomable moment where humans will eventually be confronted with something that goes way beyond their expectations about what reality can do," Opera says. "The portraits are meant to be people going through a metamorphosis or change. They all have this transcendent quality like they’re going through some kind of process."

While Opera has exhibited elsewhere, he hasn’t had an exhibition in Buffalo since 2018, and Rivalry Projects was just the place to reemerge. "This is a gallery operating at a national level and their program stands alongside galleries from major markets," Opera shares. "I’ve had shows in other cities—Chicago, Lisbon, Portland—that showed this work and never really hit the head in the way this does. I’m excited to show Buffalo what I’ve been up to."

The exhibition opens at 5 p.m. on January 17 at Rivalry Projects (106 College Street) and remains on view through February 28.