Our historic local moment could be defined through a shifting battle for our undivided attention. Capital drives a rapid consumption of images across digital platforms that condense our time into booms and busts of binary progressive associations. A set of works on paper by San Francisco-born, Washington-based artist Sally Scopa stands as an affront to these times, asking a viewer to consider the act of seeing as a reclamation of the present.
Recently on view at Bass & Reiner Gallery in San Francisco, Scopa’s Atmospheric River contains eight works that are painted on nineteenth-century stereograph cards. The stereograph was a popular entertainment tool in the mid-1800s that paired two photographs taken with a slight shift in composition onto a single card, inserted into a hand-held viewfinder, giving the images an illusion of three-dimensionality. The way the tool condensed our vision was an early precursor to how we would come to view cinema as our photographic technology developed: tunneled, to extend the imagination into a playful dance with the myths, meanings, and intentions of images themselves. This connects to our technological moment in mediation today. Since the visualizing compulsions of the early internet launched for mass consumption in the 1990s, we have been navigating, as Jonathan Crary notes in the opening of Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, a “sweeping reconfiguration of relations between an observing subject and modes of representation.” In other words, since the turn of the millennium, how we literally perceive the world has altered how we envision ourselves within it as a response.1
Taking the stereograph card as her starting point, Scopa paints her images doubled, directly on top of the two photographs. Colorful dots and washes form twin abstracted plains that remain contained within the card’s original format. In the process of painting, she highlights a kind of tension between the base photograph and the compositions she develops, leaving text on the original card visible, or forming a poetic bond with what was first depicted. Copying herself and working in relay between multiple cards at once, the smallest differences in each image’s iteration become momentous and rewarding. In “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle” (1973), Carl Jung observes how the acausality (absence of a direct cause-and-effect principle) of synchronicity opens us to its mythic potential. For Jung, synchronicity holds a kind of revelatory potential that connects the internal psychic with external objective events. As viewers moving through the work’s repeating imagery, a kind of synchronistic relation begins to take form. We enter into the mysteries of synchronicity, where an attention to motifs and moments that deviate from each other means more than their mimicry. Through sequencing and translating her images, time begins to expand. This is a radical departure from the mediation we are accustomed to today, where digital platforms hurl highly simplified images our way in rapid succession, aimed at keeping us lingering on any given interface for as long as possible.
Last month, TikTok transitioned to its US board and licensing deals. This month, landmark trials across more than forty states began against Meta’s platforms, alleging they intentionally designed addictive interfaces for minors. We’ve just entered the first calendar year without federal funding for national media. I wonder how the fallouts of each of these media shifts might accelerate or localize an already competitive space of visual culture. Digital media scholar Lisa Nakamura has argued that the deregulation of the internet in the early 2000s, and the rise of it as a visual medium, opened the general population to the extractive impacts of our shifting digital media landscape today, in a post-Fordist economy, one where value is derived from information and service, beyond the traditional factory good.2 Nakamura observes that digital image proliferation mirrors capital accumulation, affecting not just our attention spans but also reinforcing societal (often identity-based) biases. This splits the self and splinters our attention into fragmented and often incongruent segments of desire, knowledge, or worry. In other words, it forecloses us to the kind of synchronicity (acausal and revelatory) that allows for trust and discovery in our images.
Smartly shown in the context of San Francisco’s ever-expanding tech scene (and Meta’s home region), these works’ generative potential refuses the locale’s algorithmic dispositions, which have built up a sediment of preference that further Nakamura’s observations towards exploitation, speed, and one-to-one if-then statements. Mediation, it seems, in Scopa’s works, is self-implemented, performed in the round as a space to inquire about origin, process, and our greater connectivity, rather than a site of didactic reasoning. In her paintings, a landscape opens, curious and vast. An ocean stretches out under a dappled, clouded sky. A constellation of small dots buoy us to the center of a frame. These changes locate us, the viewer, inside otherwise disorienting spaces. These paintings do not just replicate themselves; they allow us to revisit a place that is foreign, with a refreshed sense of familiarity. They take an image that might challenge a viewer, and ask for another look. This return is what counters the progressive and fragmented habituated consumption of the present. It turns away from a kind of linearity that demands we come up with an answer for what something means, and illustrates how artworks can enchant us in the act of looking, contending with a moment when we are otherwise overwhelmed by visual artifices.
- Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 1. ↩︎
- Lisa Nakamura, Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet (Taylor & Francis Group, 2002). ↩︎
Sally Scopa: Atmospheric River
Bass & Reiner, San Francisco, CA
January 10, 2026–February 28, 2026