Deborah Oropallo - Heroine - Wirtz Gallery

Deborah Oropallo

Heroine

February 28 - April 21, 2012

Opening reception: Saturday, March 3, 4-6 PM

Stephen Wirtz Gallery
49 Geary St., 3rd Fl.
San Francisco
www.wirtzgallery.com


Deborah Oropallo, What have you done?, 2012, 49 x 64 inches, acrylic on canvas

Stephen Wirtz Gallery is pleased to present Heroine, an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Deborah Oropallo.  For this series, Oropallo borrows images from the internet of women in commercially-available super-hero costumes—co-opts their power, heroism and comic book iconography—and radically transforms them to create intricate and animated figural compositions, which she then prints large-scale on paper or canvas.
 
Continuing the investigation of fantasy costuming she began in her series Guise, Oropallo’s commentary in Heroine is driven by images of the populist and commercially-driven phenomenon of costumed female power identity.  She mines these source images from the internet like an archaeologist, creating archives of past and current trends in pop culture fetishism and fashion that promise the costume wearer escape, transformation into a figure of secret identity or white-hot sexuality and mighty power.
 
Oropallo then dissects the super-heroine concept by erasing and rebuilding these images of power-wear in digital layers that mimic layers of clothing, creating heroic figural amalgamations that emphasize action, gesture and emotion. Almost an inverse of paper-doll making, the figure is built in part from the residue left behind from redacted images of clothing and costume pieces.  Like warriors in a battle for equality, Oropallo’s sexy super-heroines are depicted in the throes of dramatic transformation—they struggle with their cloaking strategy, dressing and undressing simultaneously, as if they are moving in and out of their own costumed fantasy.
 
According to Oropallo, “The ‘struggle,’ I think, becomes a kind of metaphor for how women in the media have been portrayed, or wished to be portrayed…pre- or post-feminist, depending on the decade. Since the beginning of the comic-book industry in the 1940s, super-heroines have searched for identity on a broader scale. The super-hero fights for justice, but the super-heroine must also fight for equality. These eroticized and deified female characters, conformed as they are to the comics medium’s traditional visual tropes, thus carry out their struggle in a realm of ironic dichotomies—empowered and exploited, funny and tragic, masked and exposed.”
 
DEBORAH OROPALLO (b. Hackensack, NJ) received her MA and MFA from the University of California, Berkeley.  Works are included in numerous museum collections including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.  Oropallo’s series Guise was the subject of a solo exhibition at deYoung Museum in 2007, and How To, a traveling career retrospective of the artist’s work, was organized by the San Jose Museum of Art in 2001.

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