Tag: Deborah Oropallo

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The answering of questions, showing of a Real ID, emptying of pockets, x-raying of possessions, stepping through a metal detector, all under the supervision of four armed guards was a bit much, but I get it – it is a federal building. My only business at the courthouse was wanting to see a particular painting again, so all the rigamarole was forgotten when the elevator doors opened on the ninth floor and I stepped out… and gasped.

Unlike many of the artists I’ve written about in this blog, Deborah Oropallo is not a household name, but this is my third post about her.1 Since the early 1990s, I have followed her where she has gone, even when that road has been a little uncomfortable for me. When, in the early 2000s, she began “painting” with a computer, and in 2008, when she started creating video installations, I was skeptical of the media. Although I had no doubt she would create something of worth, I could only hope it would be something to which I could artistically relate. I needn’t have worried, as she brought to these media the same strong painterly aesthetic that had imbued her previous work.

Back in 1997, when Oropallo was still producing paintings that were oil on canvas, she had a solo show titled Flat Pictures at the Stephen Wirtz Gallery in San Francisco. The paintings were executed chiefly with silkscreens, which she had utilized before, but to my knowledge, never to such an extent. My favorite paintings in this particular show were of railroad tracks. There were several, some of which employ color; I prefer the black and white ones, which have a Franz Kline-esque quality to them. I seem to remember reading at the time the images were based on photos of pieces from her child’s toy train set, and that there were also actual tracks running past her studio in an industrial area of Berkeley, CA – Oropallo often makes reference to her personal environment in her work.

Although I didn’t, and still don’t know what the railroad track paintings are “about,” I do know Oropallo later used the motif in a very different manner, when she was commissioned by the General Services Administration’s Art in Architecture Program to create a piece for the United States Courthouse, Sacramento, CA.2 She was among the fourteen artists asked to draw inspiration from the natural, cultural, and/or political history of the building’s site, located in what was, during the Gold Rush and for decades afterward, a thriving Chinatown, one of the first in California.

China Pattern pictures nineteen rows of vertical tracks running the height of the piece. To thirteen of the rows, Oropallo added Chinese writing to pay homage to the roughly 15,000 Chinese immigrant laborers who in large part built the western section of the Transcontinental Railroad – these tracks signify the thirteen mountain pass tunnels through the Sierra Nevada range the workers completed. With its high-contrast, minimal palette; all-over composition; and size – nine feet tall – the painting is immediate in its visual impact. Like the earlier rail paintings, China Pattern is heavily layered; there are seemingly endless tracks, representing the nearly eight hundred miles they laid, visible under washes of white.3 The effect is dizzying, hypnotic.

Although it does have color, China Pattern has more in common visually with the earlier black and white paintings than it does with the color ones. The only color in the piece comes in the form of the characters, which spell out “fire cart” – the translation of “train” – in red, which Chinese culture associates with fire. The characters are sparse near the top of the piece and become dense at the bottom, as if the red, which Western culture associates with blood, is pooling – approximately 1200 Chinese laborers died because of the treacherous working conditions.

China Pattern would never be commissioned today – not for a federal building, at any rate. Its salute to the immigrant workforce would not be tolerated in this Brave New World we live in, one in which recognizing the contributions of people of non-European descent is considered DEI and therefore not acceptable. As a statement that serves not only as a lesson regarding a specific period in US history, but also as a rallying cry against what is the contemporary environment in this country, it is more relevant now than it was when Oropallo painted it, more than a quarter century ago.

 

1 See Moving Pictures (March 5, 2020) and Not Your Grandmother’s American Gothic (July 30, 2023).

2 The courthouse opened at 501 I Street in 1999 and in 2005 was renamed the Robert T. Matsui United States Courthouse. Matsui, a second-generation Sacramento native whose earliest memories were of the internment camp where he spent his first few years, served in the House of Representatives from 1979 until he passed away in 2005. 

3 A year after China Pattern, Oropallo had already moved on from this method of working. Although she continued to utilize silkscreens as part of the process in making her paintings, the period in which she made the rail and other related pieces didn’t last long. However, during this short time, she made work that was not only unlike the silkscreen paintings of both Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg – two artists who pioneered its use in fine art – but unlike any silkscreen paintings I’d seen before.

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I recently paid a visit to the Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco to see American Gothic, a collaborative exhibition by Deborah Oropallo and Michael Goldin. The mixed media work that comprised the show concerns their farm in Northern California and ecological issues, subjects which are obviously related and both of which Oropallo has addressed in her work over the past several years.

Although I’d previously seen at least one sculpture by Oropallo,1 I believe this is the first gallery show I’ve attended to feature such work. I’m not familiar with Goldin, but Oropallo’s aesthetic is so strong and makes such a seamless jump to the three-dimensional that it actually took some time before I realized I hadn’t before seen a show of hers largely made up of sculptural work.

Oropallo and Goldin’s piece American Gothic takes not only its title but its imagery from the Grant Wood painting, possibly the most recognized work in the history of American art. Wood’s two figures are gone, leaving only the farmer’s spectacles and his pitchfork, which now has a sewn rawhide handle replacing the functional wooden one. The Gothic-style farmhouse window from Wood’s piece appears as “reflections” in the lenses of the glasses. By encapsulating the composition in just these elements, Oropallo and Goldin have retained the “salt of the earth” allusion while opening up the image, making it less specific and more inclusive. The piece reimagines Wood’s painting in a manner that steps up the original slightly unsettling feel while also being informed by its common satirical reading and innumerable parodies.

Figuring prominently in the show are images of animals and objects from the farm. Bulls, boars, chickens, and especially sheep appear, or are at least conjured, as well as boots and buckets. Several of the three-dimensional pieces feature ducks; those in Crude and the Reflections series, covered in glossy or matte black resin, recall those horrible photos we’ve all seen of birds caught in the oil tanker spills which wreak havoc on our environment, both in the ocean and on land. In Dangling Ducks 1 and 2, the fowl appear to be burned and melting, their bills seemingly turning to liquid and dripping, as if in some darkly surreal animated cartoon.

I’ve been following Oropallo’s career for about thirty years, and her work continues to surprise. Even so, she is always building on her previous work, and certain motifs – her personal environment and the fairy tales in the present exhibition, for example – have appeared and re-appeared. This continuity was accentuated by the showing in the gallery of additional pieces, not part of this body of work, some dating back to the early 1990s. Snow White (1994) and Bad Apples (2016) both have Snow White-inspired imagery, as does the new HAVEAHART, a disturbingly humorous piece that has Snow White and all Seven Dwarfs caught in animal traps.2 Similarly, the painting Cloning Bo Peep from 2010 has echoes in BO PEEP, which evokes violence of some sort; taken by itself, I would assume against women, as so many fairy tales end badly for them. However, given the themes of the show, I think its subjects are industrial farming and animal cruelty.

Although in her video pieces Oropallo has been working with other artists for several years,3 I believe she has only recently started doing so outside of that medium.4 I presume she is attracted to the creative dialogue inherent in collaboration, which exposes her to different approaches, as throughout her career working alone, she has continually changed her techniques for making art. Like Robert Rauschenberg, she seems uncomfortable getting too comfortable – this has served her well; she has consistently produced engaging, challenging exhibitions, of which American Gothic was but the most recent.

 

1 Love + Marriage (2004), which celebrates the same-sex marriages that took place in San Francisco over twenty-nine days in February/March 2004, is on view at San Francisco City Hall, South Light Court.

2 The Haveahart® company makes humane catch and release animal traps, eight of which are used in the piece.

3 Three videos were shown in the Catharine Clark Gallery media room during the run of American Gothic. White as Snow, Wolf, and Dirty are all collaborations with Jeremiah Franklin, and take as their subject gender issues – another of Oropallo’s recurring interests, which she has also notably explored in the series Guise and Kink, among others.

4 To my knowledge, this is only the second time – Oropallo and Andy Rappaport, who have worked together on video pieces, produced the letterpress print DISARM in 2020.

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Deborah Oropallo and Andy Rappaport: still (detail) from FLOOD (2019). Video installation.

I recently saw FLOOD, a video installation by Deborah Oropallo and Andy Rappaport at the Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco. Oropallo is one of my favorite contemporary artists; I’ve been following her work since the early 1990s, when her paintings were actually made of oil on canvas. However, even then she was not a traditional painter – her conceptual bent has always been strong, and she often used silkscreens, rollers, and other tools in lieu of brushes. Her work has continually evolved, building on previous ideas while taking in new techniques and technologies. Since 2000, she has been utilizing digital imagery, which she manipulates on a computer and often works into on the canvas or paper itself. In 2017, she began collaborating with Rappaport on video projects which retain her painterly aesthetic without, obviously, being made with any paint at all.

Oropallo and Rappaport have been working with the theme of climate change and its impact on our population. Between 1995 and 2015, 2.3 billion people worldwide were affected by flooding. In this incarnation, FLOOD consists of three video screens, set in line horizontally, showing still images culled from internet news sources. Flooded streets appear and are gradually overlapped by photos of people in the deluge. The images continue to accumulate, the waters continue to rise, and the frame fills with more and more people. Rappaport’s score builds along with the images, from the musique concrète sounds of water to a pulsing beat – the impact of the whole is hypnotic, poignant, and affecting – a poetic call to action.

I’m not very learned re video art, but, as always, Oropallo excels here. The layering/montaging in the video is an extension of what she does so brilliantly in her paintings, expanded to epic proportions through the added dimension of time. Over the course of about twenty minutes, hundreds of individual images are seen. In this age, when information is so quickly forgotten in favor the next new story, to spend that amount of time contemplating a single subject is nothing short of revolutionary.

FLOOD will be on view through Saturday, March 28 – spare no pains to see it.