Opening Reception: 5 – 7pm, Saturday, April 1st, 2023
Force Fields
Sonya Rapoport
April 1st – May 13th, 2023
Opening Reception: 5 – 7pm, Saturday, April 1st, 2023
Casemore Gallery presents an exhibition of works on paper by Sonya Rapoport (1923-2015), recognized as a pioneer of computer art. The exhibition explores the evolution of her engagement with the computer, from her earliest drawings on computer printout paper in the late 1970s, through her computer-mediated “audience participation performances” in the 1980s.
Rapoport–whose work is currently on view in the exhibition Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952-1982at Los Angeles County Museum of Art–began using the computer in her practice in 1976, when she found discarded continuous-feed computer printout paper in a bin in the basement of the UC Berkeley mathematics building. Drawn to the futuristic aesthetic of sprocket holes, grid lines, and carbon-black, dot-matrix printed code, she drew into the existing patterns with graphite, colored pencil, and ink stamps, and stitched the construction together with colorful yarn to create drawings such as “Right-On” (1976), on view in the current show.
Her work has been featured in Documenta 8 (1987), Whitney Biennial (2016), and has been collected by MoMA New York, The Getty Research Institute, The Victoria & Albert Museum, SFMOMA, Berkeley Art Museum, and the San Jose Museum of Art. Rapoport’s work is currently featured in Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952-1982 at LACMA through July 2, 2023.
