Catharine Clark Gallery presents Dark Landscapes for a White House, an exhibition of photomontages and videos by Deborah Oropallo. On view from May 12 – June 16, 2018, Dark Landscapes for a White House critiques our cultural habituation to political and ecological traumas. As with earlier works, Oropallo employs photomontage as a strategy for visualizing how media-based images accumulate and overwhelm our collective consciousness. The works in Dark Landscapes for a White House, however, shift away from the portraiture of previous series, towards depictions of what Oropallo describes as conflicted “moral terrains.”
Oropallo presents her new works as “journalism in visual form,” and her compositions bear witness to global traumas that are all-too-often underreported, including oil spills and mass fires, as well as acts of human violence. By sourcing images from online news outlets, Oropallo draws attention to critical events that most people will never see, and which are elided from mainstream reportage.
Four new videos produced in collaboration with musician and composer Andy Rappaport expand the visual narratives at play in the two dimensional works, and are featured in dual presentations in the main gallery and in the media room – the shift in scale changing the viewer’s experience of the work. Oropallo’s longest and most ambitious videos to date, the four works featured — Meltdown, Blazes, Crude, and Oval O (all 2018) — layer hundreds of images of impacted natural, political, and art historical environments (from polluted oceans to the Oval Office), an amalgamation of source materials that reflects Oropallo’s deep research into – and unease with – the proliferation of visual information in news media.
Join us for an opening reception with artists’ talks on May 12, 2018 from 2 – 5pm. Artists’ talks are at 3pm.
Click here to read the press release for Dark Landscapes for a White House, opening May 12, 2018.
Check gallery website for hours and additional info
