RECKONING

An exhibition of collaborative video and photomontage works by Deborah Oropallo and Andy Rappaport.

Exhibition Dates:
January 13 - February 24, 2023

Opening Reception:
Friday, January 13, 2023, 5:00-9:00pm

Artist Talk:
Thursday, February 2 @ 7:00pm

Rivalry Projects is delighted to present Deborah Oropallo + Andy Rappaport: Reckoning as our first exhibition of 2023. This exhibition centers a suite of composite video works by Oropallo and Rappaport, along with photomontages. Oropallo has collaborated on video works with Andy Rappaport since 2017; her photomontages layer visual sources producing dense interplay between time, place, form, and content. This exhibition is on view January 13-February 24, 2023. Join us for an Opening Reception for this exhibit on Friday, January 13, 2023 from 5:00-9:00 PM. 

Rivalry Projects will be open with amended hours from 2:00-7:00 PM Wednesday-Friday, and 11:00-5:00pm Saturday through the run of the exhibit to optimize the screening experience for Oropallo and Rappaport’s videos. 

Join us for an artist talk and screening of additional video works by Oropallo + Rappaport on Thursday, February 2, 2023 at 7:00 PM. The talk will be held in person with the artists joining virtually. For more information on this exhibit and additional programming contact Gallery Director, Ryan Arthurs at ryan@rivalryprojects.com. 

Upon entering the gallery, viewers encounter a cycle of three videos by Oropallo and Rappaport with MELTDOWN (2018), CRUDE (2018) and RECKONING (2020), each of which are a 4K single channel video with 2-channel sound. Set against an unsettled sky, Oropallo and Rappaport’s “Reckoning” depicts over 200 felled and defaced monuments to America’s Confederacy, white supremacy, and global colonialism. Sourced from online reportage and news sites, RECKONING 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.” 

In addition to RECKONING, Rivalry will exhibit photomontages on paper by Oropallo, and specific to this exhibition, the artist will also exhibit new, small-scale digital artworks which remix busts of statues felled by activists from the artist’s “Portraits of Protest” series.   

The still image artworks, produced by Oropallo, are layered photomontages, each of which simultaneously layers, and dissolves images sourced from news coverage of ecological disasters. Once overlaid the images take on an internal momentum and compositional superstructure that points closer to affect of painting rather than contemporary photography. In speaking about the work the artist reflects “When you overlay news images, they look like 17th century paintings…” Undercutting the reportage function of the images she sources, Oropallo moves past preconceived boundaries of photograph-as-document within layers of decimation and destruction. 

WORKS

ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES 

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. She has collaborated on video works with Andy Rappaport since 2017.

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. The collaborative video work with Andy Rappaport 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. The artists’ video FLIGHT (2019) was featured in an exhibition at the Triton Museum of Art in Santa Clara, California in 2019. In 2020, FLIGHT was acquired by 21c Museum Hotels, Louisville, Kentucky for its permanent collection. Also, in 2020, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive acquired Oropallo’s video GOING BALLASTIC (2017) for its permanent collection.

Andy Rappaport was born in New York, New York in 1957 and has had a nearly 50-year long involvement with music, sound, photography, and technology. 

Rappaport’s collaboration with 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. In 2024, Oropallo’s survey exhibition at the Schneider Museum of Art in Ashland, Oregon will also include collaborative projects with Rappaport, and a monographic catalog.

Opening Reception

Artist Talks

Artist Talks: Deborah Oropallo + Andy Rappaport

Rivalry will also be hosting artist talks in the gallery on Thursday, February 2, 2022 at 7pm.

The artists will be joining the conversation virtually. Refreshments will be served.