“Braced”, 2011, mixed media on paper, 60 x 44′‘

Few artists have blurred the line between photography and painting as thoroughly and convincingly as Deborah Oropallo. Her pixel-by-pixel method of reworking Internet images is, by its very nature, perfectly suited to an era in which personal identity can be reinvented on-the-fly with a few mouse clicks. But unlike the ideologically freighted identity art of the ‘80s and ‘90s, Oropallo’s is refreshingly open-ended. It doesn’t proselytize; it just poses and fantasizes.  Its high-camp, wide-open, anything-goes stance, will, I predict, position Oropallo as the art world’s answer to the virtual one we’ve created. That Internet downloads enabled her futuristic, gender-confused universe makes the irony of its creation as delicious as the artist’s irrepressible bad-girl attitude. That her art breaks through our acquired resistance to media imagery is, I think, a tribute to the 20 years the artist spent as a painter before moving into the digital realm in 2000. 

Guise, her 2007 show at the de Young Museum, was a major breakthrough. Onto 17^th century portraits of aristocrats, emperors, kings and other authority figures, Oropallo superimposed female faces. She replaced pants with skirts, stockings with garters and boots with high-heels. The result was an androgynous look in which power poses and gestures typically struck by men were inhabited by she-men.  Wrapped in a kind of gauzy, anamorphic, now-you-see-it-now-you don’t haze, the pictures baffled unassuming visitors, fooling them into thinking they were viewing tired old museum fare, when in fact the notion of the inviolable historic portrait was being surreptitiously and slyly subverted. The pictures were convincingly male and female; they conveyed what a third gender might actually look like. They revised the history of power relations between the sexes, creating as Oropallo has stated, “a new royalty” out of nurses, maids and others low on history’s social totem pole. 

“Armed”, 2011, mixed media on paper, 28 x 22”

Two years later, at the Stephen Wirtz Gallery (and at Gallery 16 which created prints from the series), she unveiled the Wild, Wild West Show: kitschy fantasy pictures based on downloaded images of rodeo queens clad in skimpy outfits. Like the figures in Guise, these felt like apparitions, too. The source images, which underwent extreme digital surgery, appeared to have been selectively erased, and with only portions of the bodies and pieces of clothing intact, all that remained were ghosts executing hyperkinectic gestures. Measuring nearly seven feet tall and mounted on aluminum panels, the prints were at once intimate and distant, erotic and horrifying. They were also radical and thrilling.  Oropallo had pushed her skills as a digital painter to a new level – one that probably didn’t win over any old-school critics who wished she’d return to the brush.  But she definitely re-affirmed and enlarged her status as a game-changing artist.

Tale Spin, Oropallo’s current exhibit at Gallery 16, builds on those innovations. For openers each print is unique.  The source images, culled from costume websites, are printed on paper-backed lengths of silk and chiffon and affixed to sheets of paper. The resulting pictures are messy, highly tactile composites of bold, see-through action gestures. Their distressed surfaces, with their dangling threads, have a battered, bandaged look – one whose multiple layers will likely require an almost anthropological effort on the part of viewers to fully soak in the details.  Where Cindy Sherman is the historical antecedent for Guise, de Kooning, with his slashing gestures and fierce, comic, demonic women provide the template for Tale Spin.  Oropallo’s, like de Kooning’s, are composed of parts that seem to live independent lives and create crazy shifts in pictorial anatomy.  But they are clearly her own.  They reflect the artist’s complex relationship to the stuff of her childhood: uniforms, costumes and fairytales.  The latter, she recently told a Gallery 16 audience, are always “about death and dismemberment and rape; a little girl is always the victim.  I wanted these girls to be grown up in kind of a post-feminist way,” one “that would put the wolf on the run.” 

“Subdued”, 2011, mixed media on paper, 60 x 44”

To effect such a “spin” the artist asked, “What would Bo Peep be afraid of today?”  From web queries like “designer gas mask” she found answers in products like the Emergency Bra, whose cups convert into a dual respirator gas mask, perfect for protection against terrorist attacks like 9/11 which spewed toxic dust across Manhattan. “That would be what you would have to be afraid of if you were a shepherd today,” Oropallo stated.

The figures in Tale Spin mix terror and humor in roughly equal parts. Gas-mask outfitted models are funny. Faceless mini-skirted babes, not so much. In between those poles, Oropallo offers a host of female superheroes striking poses we’ve seen in comic characters from Wonder Woman and Spider Man to Bat Man and Captain America. Like Guise, which postulated a world of infinitely fluid sexuality, Tale Spin operates outside the axis of good vs. evil. The figures project power, but their titles (Entangled, Dubious, Cured, Cursed, Powerlessness, Lost, Hushed, and Muffled ) take it away. Make what you will of that. 

Belle, 2009 permanet pigment print and silkscreen on paper 36 x 22 1/2 inches

Deborah Oropallo is an artist who consistently shocks and amazes. She doesn’t do this with violence or brutality. Instead, she does it subtlely, with images that challenge how we feel and think. While many conceptual artists rely on explanatory texts to support ambiguous visual statements, Oropallo makes her ideas explicit; so much so that they seem to be embedded in her materials at an almost cellular level. 

I first saw Oropallo’s work in 2001, at her San Jose Museum of Art retrospective, How to: The Art of Deborah Oropallo. There, she took abject subjects — 55-gallon drums, canisters of gas, nylon rope and a variety of other derelict industrial objects – and transformed them into something exquisite. The drums, for example, she painted bright orange and turquoise and presented them in cellophane, like shrink-wrapped gifts whose lurid colors recalled the toxic waterways documented by photographer Edward Burtynsky. But unlike the realities Burtynsky documented, Oropallo’s fictions made the banal iconic, and it was unnerving. Having lived and worked in Silicon Valley, I knew the chemically tainted environment of these objects all too well, and I was shocked to see them in a museum, much less in one so close to areas where local groundwater had been contaminated. But more than anything, I was struck by how beautiful these paintings were and how strongly I was attracted to them. This uneasy, bifurcated reaction was further complicated by Oropallo’s seamless mixture of painting and photography.

Pipe Ends, 2001, Iris print with silkscreen overprinting, 47 x 35 inches

I later experienced an even more disquieting juxtaposition of real and unreal at Guise, Oropallo’s 2007 show at the de Young Museum. There, she grafted the faces and bodies of female models onto reproductions of 17^th and 18^th century portraits, the originals of which depict men and women in Napoleonic-era garb flashing displays of wealth and power. There was talk about them being symbols of female empowerment.   But there was quite a bit more going on. By today’s standards, the men in the original paintings, with their tights, wigs and high-heeled shoes, seem positively effeminate – a fact that Oropallo exploited to demonstrate what the world might look like if humans were truly hermaphroditic. 

Napoleon, 2007, permanent pigment print, 60 x 40 inches

The pictures had a gauzy, now-you-see it, now-you-don’t quality. They seemed to shift in and out of focus like anamorphic images, making it easy to think that if viewed from a certain angle the figures might suddenly reveal their true nature: male or female. Instead, they clung to their Middlesex status, creating the eerie possibility that Oropallo’s digital sleight of hand might somehow be capable of incarnating their biological equivalents in real life.

Cody (left) and Coy (right), 2009, both permanent pigment on aluminum, 81 x 51 inches

Star, 2009, permanent pigment on aluminum, 81 x 51 inches

Candida Höfer, "Palacio Peredo-Barreda de Caja Cantabria Santillana del Mar I” (2004), C-print, 73 x 89"

Contrary to what one might expect from a show titled "Decline and Fall", this is not an exhibition about the demise of the American Dream — or about anything else that’s in the news.  This show skirts topicality almost completely and focuses instead on the meltdown and transformation of the hierarchies that surround us.  Modes of artistic expression, interpretations of history, shifting gender roles, the dissolution of middle-class values and vanities, linguistic incoherence and the fact of our own corporeal demise are among the topics addressed by the 12 artists assembled here by gallery co-director Jenny Baie.  [A short Q&A with Ms. Baie follows this review.]

Key among the those charting such transformations is Candida Höfer.  For years, her super-sized images of public spaces have commanded rapt attention. She, along with her counterparts in the Dusseldorf School of Photography, helped rehabilitate the once-discredited idea of photographic veracity with hyperreal images of stunning clarity  Still, I have never been able to shake the feeling that Hofer siphons all the oxygen out a room before taking a picture. And it’s precisely that leaden quality that makes her appearance in “Decline and Fall” feel so right.  The picture on view here, “Palacio Peredo-Barreda de Caja Cantabria Santillana del Mar I” (2004), shows the interior of a once-grand palace that is now a bit down at the heels. It’s a pliable mascot of sorts, one whose tarnished grandeur functions as a symbol for the demise of practically every established order you can think of.

In addition to Höfer, the show includes Doug Hall, Martin Klimas, Ian McDonald, Andrew Moore, Vik Muniz, Joseph Park, Deborah Oropallo, Marci Washington, John Waters, Fred Wilson and Bing Wright. Appropriately, it leans heavily toward photography and on photo-based hybrids.

Vik Muniz, “Gordian Puzzles: The Tower of Babel, after Pieter Breugel” (2007), C-print, 75 x 98"

The most notable of these is Vik Muniz whose “Gordian Puzzles: The Tower of Babel, after Pieter Breugel” (2007) transforms the Dutch artist’s 1563 painting, of a crumbling citadel, into a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces were conjoined in a fractured, three-dimensional collage and then photographed. The resulting image is as confounding as the knot that Alexander the Great is said to have cut in one fell swoop. But the Gordian conundrum, if I read Muniz correctly, is far simpler than anything we face today; we are as deafened by the din of our own bickering as we were in Biblical times. 

Martin Klimas, "Untitled", (2003), color photo, 43 x 66"

Fred Wilson, Untitled Bust, 1992-2000, mixed media, 8 3/4 x 9 x 5 1/2"; Deborah Oropallo, "Repunzel," 2008, digital pigment print, acrylic on canvas, 30 x 26"

The two paintings here, "Maid with Squirrel" (2008) and “Repunzel” (2008), both from her "Feign" series, are somewhat less complex, but just as psychologically loaded. Based on downloaded images of models, they are digitally manipulated and then ouput as paint on canvas. They are, if nothing else, magnificently decadent, as the "heroin-chic" affection of "Repunzel" attests. 

John Waters, "60th Birthday", 2006, C-print, 25.5 x 20.5"

Film director/photographer John Waters, the high priest of high camp (and as of late, a marquee name on Broadway), frames the concept of decline and fall in personal terms: in a gruesomely altered film still of a woman whose sagging face and wrinkled hands look like something Joel Peter Witkin might have created had he gotten hold of Joan Crawford in her role in “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?”. Waters used the picture to commemorate his 60^th birthday in 2006.

Just as creepy is Marci Washington’s high-Goth painting “To Walk These Halls – Unnamed and Unmourned” (2009). With a disintegrating skeleton set against patterned wallpaper, it warns (according to the artist) that our repression of history is akin to a skeleton in the closet. The Freudian part rings true, but the picture is too simplistic to carry the idea.  By contrast, culture warrior Fred Wilson’s attempt to Africanize the Euro-centric view of art history – by inserting an Egyptian figurine into a Greek bust – is as clever as it is subversive. But one wonders how it wound up next to the over-aestheticized Hallmark sentiment conveyed in Bing Howard’s photo of fallen rose petals.  

Decline and Fall” casts a wide net. That it pulls in everything but topical news is a decisive victory for a concept that is as wide-open as the unwritten history of our times.

Q&A with Curator/Co-Director Jenny Baie

Deborah Oropallo, Maid with Squirrel, 2008, digital pigment print, acrylic on canvas 30 x 29"

Andrew Moore, Peter the Great and BMW (Old Sculptor’s Studio), 2001, C-print, 30 x 40"

Joseph Park, Leave it on the Dance Floor, 2008, oil on panel, 24 x 18"