Catherine Opie, Untitled #5 (Inauguration Portrait), 2009, C-print, 16 x 24 in. (40.6 x 60.9 cm), Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles, CA © Catherine Opie. |
Catherine Opie, Recent Political Works, questioning Human Values |
Catherine Opie, Sunrise #1, 2009, C-print, 50 x 37.5 in. (127 x 93.9 cm), Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles, CA © Catherine Opie.
Catherine Opie, Sunset #1, 2009, C-print, 50 x 37.5 in. (127 x 93.9 cm), Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles, CA © Catherine Opie. |
Institute of Contemporary Art Catherine Opie: Empty and Full, an exhibition of new and recent work by photographer Catherine Opie, including photographs of recent political demonstrations and gatherings — ranging from the inauguration of President Obama to Tea Party rallies. Her work explores the intimate relations between community and politics, citizens and the landscape, offering a dynamic portrait of the United States at the dawn of the 21st century. One of the defining artists of her generation, Opie is known for her portraits and landscapes. "Catherine Opie: Empty and Full is a timely exhibition by an important artist, whose work continues to pose and frame questions about the most basic human values: love, community, family, and freedom,” says Jill Medvedow, director of the ICA. “Opie’s recent work elaborates on the relationship between people and place, particularly the energy and desires created when masses of people convene around a shared interest or value,” says Molesworth. “Freedom of assembly is one of the rights Americans take for granted and Opie is interested in the way that sites, such as the National Mall in Washington, D.C., come to be defined by the groups of people who assemble there and how their gathering shapes the identity of the place. Drawing on the long and august tradition of American landscape painting and documentary photography, Opie ultimately gives us a picture of a great experiment: democracy in action.” The first series is entitled Inauguration and documents the enormous crowds that convened in Washington, D.C., for President Barack Obama’s inauguration. These images show us portraits of Americans assembled en masse on the Mall, bundled up against the January cold to await the arrival of the new president. Shot against a landscape of pale winter light and bare trees, Opie’s photographs capture moments of individual emotion on a day that recognized the hopes and voices of an American majority. Other works are images of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival and the annual convening of the Boy Scouts of America. These works further Opie’s interest in the specific use made of the landscape, as well as her ideas about the wide variety of ideals and beliefs held by Americans in their pursuit of a meaningful life. These lush and pastoral images are held in contrast with images Opie has been taking of political protests in urban areas, notably Tea Party rallies, pro-immigration marches, and anti-war demonstrations. A comparison is made between urban and rural, pleasure and protest, leisure and commitment, all of which add up to a rich and complex view of the United States, our citizens and our deeply engrained relationship to the landscape. Installed around the perimeter of the ICA gallery is a series of devastatingly beautiful images of the ocean. These images, from a body of work called Twelve Miles to the Horizon, were taken over a period of ten days, one at every sunrise and one at every sunset, from the deck of a massive container ship making the passage from Busan, Korea, to Long Beach, California. These pictures of sunrises and sunsets all share the same horizon line, are radically unpopulated, and are feats of technical precision and sublime beauty. Their “emptiness” stands in stark contrast to the fullness of the political pictures. Despite the formal differences between the two “types” of images on view in Empty and Full, there is also a strain of continuity. In each body of work, Opie suggests a profound level of interconnection and interdependence that people have not only with one another, but with the spaces we collectively inhabit. Born in 1961 in Sandusky, Ohio, Catherine Opie has become one of America’s premier documentarians, photographing the American landscape — from its Alaskan glaciers to its suburban freeways — as frequently as she images its citizens. A graduate of Cal Arts, she currently teaches in the studio program at the University of California at Los Angeles. Select solo exhibitions include Catherine Opie: Figure and Landscape at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2010), Catherine Opie: American Photographer at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (2008), Catherine Opie: Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2006). Opie was a 2009 recipient of the President’s Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Women’s Caucus for Art and was awarded a United States Artists Fellowship in 2006. The exhibition was organized by ICA Chief Curator Helen Molesworth. |
Catherine Opie, Untitled #2 (Tea Party Rally), 2010, InkJetPrint, 16 x 24 in. (40.6 x 60.9 cm), Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles, CA © Catherine Opie. |
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Catherine Opie, Joanne, Betsy, & Olivia, Bayside, New York, 1998, Chromogenic print, 40 x 50", Edition of 5, 2 APs, Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles, Image copyright and courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles. |
Remarking on the Quotidian, a Mid-Career Survey of Catherine Opie |
Catherine Opie, Oliver in a Tutu, 2004, Chromogenic print, 24 x 20", Edition of 5, 2 APs, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, 2006, Image copyright and courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles.
Catherine Opie, Frankie, 1995, Chromogenic print, 20 x 16", Edition of 8, 2 APs, Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles, Image copyright and courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles.
Catherine Opie, Untitled #10 (Surfers), 2003, Chromogenic print, 50 x 40", Edition of 5, 2 APs, Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles, Image copyright and courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles.
Catherine Opie, Self Portrait / Nursing, 2004, Chromogenic print, 40 x 32", Edition 7 of 8, 2 APs, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Purchased with funds contributed by the International Director’s Council and Executive Committee Members, 2005, Image opyright and courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles. |
Guggenheim Museum Since the early 1990s, Catherine Opie has produced a complex body of work, adopting genres such as studio portraiture, landscape photography, and urban street photography to explore notions of communal, sexual, and cultural identity. From her early portraits of queer subcultures to her expansive urban landscapes, Opie has offered insights into the conditions in which communities form and the terms that define them. All the while maintaining a strict formal rigor, working in stark and provocative color as well as richly toned black and white. Influenced by social documentary photographers such as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and August Sander, Opie underscores and elevates the poignant yet unsettling veracity of her subjects. Catherine Opie: American Photographer is organized by Jennifer Blessing, Curator of Photography; with Nat Trotman, Assistant Curator Catherine Opie: American Photographer gathers together significant examples from several of Opie’s most important series in a major mid-career survey. Though Opie’s photographs have been shown extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan — including one-person exhibitions at Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut; Artpace, San Antonio; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, California; St. Louis Art Museum; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; andPhotographers’ Gallery, London — no exhibition has yet offered an overview of her richly diverse artistic project. Catherine Opie: American Photographer serves to fill this void. Opie first came to prominence with her Portraits series (1993-97), which celebrates the queer community in San Francisco and Los Angeles, including practitioners of drag, transgendered people, and performance artists. Set against brilliantly colored backgrounds, these figures confront the viewer with intense gazes, asserting their individuality and destabilizing conventional notions of gender. Opie describes these sitters, all of whom she knew personally, as her "royal family;" by adopting a style inspired by portraitists like 16th-century German painter Hans Holbein, she offers an affirmative and tender portrayal of a subculture rendered invisible by dominant cultural norms. Concurrently with the Portraits, in the mid-1990s Opie began to photograph urban landscapes in Los Angeles. Her first city series, Freeways (1994-95), pictures city highways devoid of human presence, their sweeping slabs of concrete set against the sky. Nearly abstract and printed on an intimate scale, these photographs are nonetheless analogous to Opie’s portraits in their majesty. As documents of a primary aspect of daily travel in Los Angeles, Freeways suggests how strategies and structures meant to connect people can in fact divide them. The Houses series (1995) continued Opie’s urban exploration through crisp, frontal views of Beverly Hills and Bel Air mansions that, like the Freeways, appear devoid of human presence. Yet each pristine façade retains as distinct a character as each of the friends Opie portrays— these houses structure and signify the community within which their occupants exist. Symbols of the archetypal “American Dream,” they are nonetheless armed with complex security systems, massive doors, and ornate gates, marking an entirely separate community, one closed off to the artist, the viewer, and the rest of the surrounding city. Opie’s interests in portraiture and domestic architecture continued to develop, and began to merge, in her series Domestic (1995-98). Produced during a three-month trip across the country, these large-scale, color photographs document lesbian families engaged in everyday household activities, in settings varying from city apartments to country homes. Repositioning these unconventional families within the iconography of the classic American home, Opie envisions a more inclusive, complex image of the contemporary family. More recently, Opie has turned to her own domestic life in the series In and Around Home (2004–05), in which she photographs her own family and friends amidst the diverse cultural setting of her Los Angeles neighborhood. Following the Freeways, Opie has continued to investigate the ways communities form and display themselves within urban settings, in an extended series of panoramic black-and-white photographs called American Cities (1997-present). Exploring the urban environments of Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York, Chicago, and St. Louis, among others, Opie reveals the variety of communities that exist within each city. For example, the Mini-Malls, the group of photographs that initiated American Cities, focuses insistently on the billboards, signs, and architectural elements that identify various ethnic and cultural groups in each eponymous setting. Characteristically, all the series’ photographs are emptied of human presence. With their romantic purity, each of the American Cities becomes an iconic, ideal platform for potential community interaction. Ever seeking to diversify her artistic work, Opie has also turned away from the city, looking toward nature and the itinerant communities that exist upon it. In Icehouses (2001), she turns to the brightly painted structures built by ice fishers on frozen lakes in Minnesota. Viewed from afar, surrounded by an infinite vista of misty snow and atmosphere, the patchy assemblage of icehouses seems diminutive and immaterial. Similarly, the subjects of Surfers (2003) are virtually engulfed in the vast and gloomy shoreline of Malibu, where they watch and wait to be swept up by oncoming waves. Picturing their changing positions over the course of 14 photographs, Opie presents a rich visual metaphor for the shifting and contingent nature of community itself, as it exists in any environment. Catherine Opie: American Photographer is accompanied by a major publication, the first to gather all of Opie’s various projects in one volume. Each of the artist’s series are reproduced in full color plates made under the artist’s supervision, including works beyond those displayed in the exhibition, in order to give the most complete overview of Opie’s work ever available. The catalogue features a lead essay by Jennifer Blessing, the Guggenheim’s Curator of Photography, which surveys Opie’s artistic career and its historical contexts, as well as a series of interviews with the artist by Russell Ferguson. Tthe museum has also commissioned a brief personal reflection by internationally renowned novelist Dorothy Allison, whose work explores concerns similar to Opie’s. Finally, the catalogue includes introductory essays on each of the artist’s series by Nat Trotman, Assistant Curator at the Guggenheim, as well as a newly researched, exhaustive exhibition history and bibliography. Together, the exhibition and catalogue will prove to be the primary source for an understanding of Opie’s work, providing audiences with a valuable opportunity to examine firsthand the interconnections between the artists’ various styles and subjects. |
Catherine Opie, Untitled #1 from Mini-mall series, 1997, IRIS print, 16 x 41", Edition of 5, Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles, Image copyright and courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles. |
Catherine Opie, from left, Untitled # 1-8, (The Blue of Distance), 2007, C-prints, Edition 1 of 5 + 1AP, 71 x 53.3 cm. |
Catherine Opie's Panoramic Landscapes that Loom in the Distance |
Left, Catherine Opie, Beatrice, 2004, C-print, 50 x 40 cm.; right, Catherine Opie, Skylar, 2004, C-print, 50 x 40 cm.
Left, Catherine Opie, Ben, 2004, C-print, 50 x 40 cm.; right, Catherine Opie, Charlotte, 2004, C-print, 50 x 40 cm.
Left, Catherine Opie, Gabe, 2004, C-print, 50 x 40 cm.; right, Catherine Opie, Petey, 2004, C-print, 50 x 40 cm.
Left, Catherine Opie, Georgia, 2004, C-print, 50 x 40 cm.; right, Catherine Opie, Pilar, 2004, C-print, 50 x 40 cm. |
Stephen Friedman Gallery For the past 20 years Opie has wandered the North American continent, photographing communities and deserted urban landscapes in a desire to document the played-out ideal of the American dream. From her early studio portraiture of transsexual and queer communities to her polaroids of urban American life from In and Around Home, Opie’s contemporary take on classic genres builds a conceptual montage of contemporary American identity. The exhibition title, The Blue of Distance, is inspired by Rebecca Solnit, a writer on photography and landscape. Here, Opie continues her investigation with two new series of work capturing the remote beauty of the Alaskan landscape. Created using a digital camera without manipulation, these colour photographs document immense and sublime landscapes free from any trace of humanity. The Blue of Distance is an installation of eight photographs taken at different times of the day on a boat trip to Glacier Bay. They impart a poetic, semi-abstract vision of blue monochromes, where sky and water meet the horizon. In Edge of Time, a series of nine photographs taken on the same boat trip, Opie focuses her lens on a cliff face overlooking the water, where millennia have shaped and etched the rock face. In each series, the photographs are hung half an inch apart, with the horizon line running continuously at the same level, creating panoramas that completely immerse the viewer. Moving beyond the territory of the body and the ‘man-made’, Opie taps into feelings about wilderness and being lost within it. The emphasis on the horizon line, a potent symbol in American culture, underlines notions of time, space, and uncharted territory. This is momentarily disrupted, however, by two distinct and monumental photographs hung at either end of the gallery where the landscape is punctuated with signs of life: tourists visiting a waterfall; a grizzly bear surrounded by a pack of wolves. This sudden dislocation shifts the sense of reality, causing the viewer to see themselves in the third person. Photographed at such a distance these tiny figures are engulfed by the environment, their presence surreal and insignificant in comparison to the vast and enduring terrain. Transcending documentation, the wild Alaskan landscape, colonised and disputed by mankind, becomes a signifier of the internal geography of the American psyche. Catherine Opie has exhibited in museums worldwide. Recent solo exhibitions include Catherine Opie: American Photographer, Guggenheim Museum, New York (2008); Catherine Opie: 1999 & In and Around Home, Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2006) touring to the Orange County Museum of Art, California, Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art, OH, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC; Catherine Opie: Chicago (American Cities), MCA Chicago, Chicago (2006). Recent group shows include Global Feminisms, Brooklyn Museum, New York (2007); Into Me/Out of Me, PS1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY (2006); The Unhomely: Phantom Scenes in Global Society, curated by Okwui Enwezor, 2nd International Biennial of Contemporary Art, Seville, Spain (2006) and Universal Experience: Art, Life, and the Tourist's Eye, curated by Francesco Bonami, MCA, Chicago, IL touring to the Hayward, London (2005). |
Catherine Opie, from left, Untitled # 1-9 (The Edge of Time), 2007, C-prints, Edition of 5, 71 x 53.3 cm. |
