Collaboration

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113, 2019
Debporah Oropallo and Andy Rappaport
Installation View: Southern Oregon University (Ashland, OR), April 2024

Rappaport’s collaboration with Deborah Oropallo began in 2018 with four single-screen video works completed for an exhibition at the Catherine Clark Gallery in San Francisco. This ongoing collaboration has since expanded to 13 works, including several large-scale multi-screen installations. The works all deal with social and political themes and use images, sound, time, and space to challenge viewers to consider and reconsider difficult local and global issues — refugees and migration, protest and suppression, environmental disaster, war and conflict, school shootings — by exploiting tensions between visual and sonic beauty and brutal reality.

Most of the works start with stacks of multilayered montaged frames Deborah Oropallo creates from found images. They then evolve through an iterative and highly collaborative process as Rappaport distributes them through space and time via video processing and compositing, music composition, and sound and installation design.

The works in this collaboration draw on a common artistic vision but very different backgrounds and practices of the two artists and has led to discovery as each artists encourages the other to stretch. The very first works drew Rappaport — then, as now, a serious guitar player — back to his discovery of synthesizers, via a very rare Buchla in an even rarer college electronic music lab in 1974. All of the sounds in the original compositions for these collaborative works are electronically generated, including the ones that sound like actual instruments, bells, voices, and so forth. In some cases tens of different synthesizers contribute to a single track, many highly specialized, vintage, or custom built, and each selected and programmed for a specific sound or virtual instrument. These are then combined into a score via a mix of hand programmed and algorithmic music sequences, usually composed iteratively during the sequencing and editing of the video. For many of the works, the audio includes significant subsonic energy, varying dynamics, polyrhythms, and other psychoacoustic effects that are important for the overall experience both artists intend the works to create.

These collaborative works have beenexhibited widely, including at the Triton Museum, the Schneider Art Museum, 21c, the Di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Paris Photo, Untitled Miami, Expo Chicago, and numerous galleries, group shows, and special presentations. Works are in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Kramlich Collection, 21c, the Schneider Museum, and several private collections.

The Oropallo-Rappaport collaboration is represented by Catharine Clark Gallery.

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CRUDE and MELTDOWN (2018) are two of the initial four collaborative works and the first to feature original scores. Both deal with environmental themes: ravages of oil spills in CRUDE and the disappearances of ice formations in MELTDOWN. Both contrast stark beauty with horrifying global consequence. The scores were written to echo this paradox.

CRUDE, 2018
Deborah Oropallo and Andy Rapapport
Single channel video with 2-channel sound
Running time: 6 minutes 39 seconds

Excerpt from CRUDE

MELTDOWN, 2018
Deborah Oropallo and Andy Rappapotr
Single-channel Video with 2-channel sound.
Running time: 6 minutes 24 seconds

Excerpt from MELTDOWN

ONE WORLD (2021) is a remembrance of the World Trade Center, created on the 20th anniversary of 9/11. While the images of the destruction of buildings is now firmly etched in the world’s collective conscience, this work uses hundreds of constructed images, many drawn from actual postcards, displayed as videos on 35 post card sized monitors as a reminder of the life the of buildings before they came down. Of course, the ending is known even at the beginning.

For the score, Rappaport programmed a 5-piece jazz ensemble and composed a piece in the style of the musicians he associates with the 1970s New York Jazz. It’s an upbeat piece that devolves into chaos at the end.

ONE WORLD, 2021
Deborah Oropallo and Andy Rappaport
7-channel video with 2-channel sound
Shown on 35 post-card size monitors
Running time: 6 minutes

ONE WORLD
Installation View, DiRosa (Napa, CA), April 2024

FLIGHT (2019) depicts the universality of suffering as refugees seek escape and shelter on essentially every continent. The work shows on nine framed monitors, the ornate frames suggesting ancestral portraits — our ancestors were refugees; the survivors depicted here will be someone’s ancestors. It’s a reminder that this is a problem of humanity not just of numbers.

This work has been shown in several museums, but the artists had the opportunity in December 2019 to show it outdoors on the beach in Miami, only a mile or two from some of the landing scenes depicted in the work.

The score makes heavy use of randomness inside regular musical rhythms, an intentional metaphor.

FLIGHT, 2019
Deborah Oropallo and Andy Rappaport
9-channel video with 2-channel sound
Running time: 11 minutes 4 seconds

FLIGHT
Installation View, Untitled Miami, December 2019

FLOOD (2019) uses three screens and non-linear sequencing of images to confront viewers with the constancy of water and the devastation too much of it wreaks, especially in areas of relative poverty. The work was first shown outdoors in a pool at the Los Angeles Arboretum. The installation video here not only shows the work, but captures the sound of the local peacocks that responded to various instruments and themes in the score.

FLOOD, 2019
Deborah Oropallo and Andy Rappaport
3-channel video with 2-channel sound
Running time: 21 minutes 20 seconds

FLOOD
Installation View: Digital Nature, Los Angeles Arobretum, March 2019

113 (2019) documents 113 U.S. high school shootings between the shooting at Columbine, CO in 1999 and the start of work on this piece in 2018. Deborah Oropallo realized that each of those high schools has athletic fields, each ringed with an oval track the evokes oval overlaying the human form in the NRA shooting target. Each of those schools also has a marching band, playing drum battles for school spirit around those fields. The artists had read that victims of schools shootings don’t register the sound of gunshots at first, leading Rappaport to compose a drum battle score, but with snare drums becoming slowly recognizable as gunshots at the end.

113, 2019
Deborah Oropallo and Andy Rappaport
7-channel video with 2-channel sound
Running tme: 5 minutes 15 seconds

113
Installation view: Southern Oregon University (Ashland, OR), April 2024

IRAN is constructed from images and sounds of the mass protests following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in Tehran in September, 2022. Amini was severely beaten after being arrested for not wearing a proper Hijab and thus allowing her hair to be seen in public. She died in police custody several days later. The protests were the largest in Iran since those of 2019-2020; police murdered hundreds of protestors.

The soundtrack is composed entirely from sounds recorded at the actual protests. A young Iranian musician named Farmehr Farsian processed these sounds to create virtual instruments and has encouraged musicians around the world to compose music using these instruments as a way of drawing attention to the injustice of Amin’s death. More on that project can be found here.

Rappaport used Farsian’s virtual instruments to compose an abstract requiem to Amini and the protesters who perished in her name.

IRAN, 2024
Deborah Oropallo and Andy Rappaport
Single-channel video with 2-channel sound
Running time: 13 minutes 36 seconds

Excerpt from IRAN