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Indepth Arts News:
"Altered States of America: Catherine Opie"
2000-08-09 until 2000-09-24
Photographer's Gallery
London, ,
UK
In her first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom, American
photographer Catherine Opie presents a selection of work
made over the last seven years. It includes the first showing in
Europe of her latest series, Domestic. Opie is a
photographer who combines a breathtaking technical
virtuosity with subject matter which is alternately transgressive
and shocking, classical and composed.
Im kind of a twisted social documentary photographer
Catherine Opie shot to prominence in the mid 1990s with a
spectacular sequence of Portraits of her close friends within
Los Angeles leather community: transvestites,
female-to-male transsexuals, drag queens, body manipulators
and others who pioneer the body as a site of sexual and
aesthetic experimentation. Opie created a sequence of
elegant, gorgeously coloured portraits which give their
subjects a regal dignity: they stare back through us instead of
being the ones continually stared at. The series includes a
number of self-portraits, including Bo, 1994. One of several
Opie alter-egos, Bo - a butch, mustachioed, tattooed truck
driver - represents a different, darker side of the artist. In other
Self Portraits, Opie pushes this sense of psychic and
physical self-exploration to an extreme by subjecting her body
to a series of painful manipulations. I wanted to push the
whole realm of beauty and elegance, she says, but also to
make people scared out of their wits.
Catherine Opie always understands the surface of things -
whether the extravagantly decorated bodies of her friends, or
the facades of buildings in her local community - as expressive
of the individual within. Her move in 1995 to seemingly formal,
architectural subjects was an unexpected departure, yet
entirely consistent with her concerns as an artist. My work is
always close to home. Its always about my surroundings and
the way I wander through the world, she says, It is about how
communities begin to form and how people try to change
themselves. The Houses and Landscapes are pictures of
houses, and at the same time, portraits of the invisible
individuals who occupy them. Shot head-on, these homes in
middle-class LA suburbia have been personalised in
surprising ways by their inhabitants, while remaining firmly
barricaded from the outside world.
This series was followed by Freeways, miniature platinum
prints shot on a specially-made 7 x 17 Banquet camera.
These soft, silvery pictures of LAs gigantic concrete roads
and soaring flyovers are reminiscent of 19th century travellers
photographs in the Holy Land or the Valley of the Kings.
Photographed at dawn, and emptied of cars and people, they
appear like ruins or archeological sites being pictured for the
first time. The Mini-malls also impart a sense of history to a
cityscape which is famously impermanent. Here Opie
documents, with Becher-like objectivity, the prosaic shopping
strips which have grown up around LA. Whether in Korean,
Japanese, or Mexican neighbourhoods, each Mini-mall
expresses the ethnic identity and social life of the community
it serves, through the haphazard design of its shop fronts and
signage.
Last year, Catherine Opie drove 9,000 miles across the
States, stopping to photograph lesbian families and couples
en route. Domestic is a photographic love poem to
relationships that flourish in the privacy of the home, a
celebration of family life played out in a way very different to
that imagined in the American Dream. Intimate and lush, the
series marks her return to colour portraiture and continues to
question what constitutes the ideal home and the ideal family.
Born in 1961, Catherine Opie grew up in Sandusky, Ohio, and
has been making photographs since the age of nine. She
studied photography at San Francisco Art Institute and at
CalArts, and now lives and works in Los Angeles and New
York. She has exhibited widely with solo shows at the
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 1997 and
contributions to important group exhibitions such as
Sunshine and Noir (Louisiana Museum; Kunstmuseum
Wolfsburg), Veronicas Revenge (Deichtorhallen, Hamburg;
MCA Sydney) and Rrose is a Rrose is a Rrose: Gender
Performance in Photography (Guggenheim Museum, New
York).
The exhibition is accompanied by a 60pp hardback book with
an interview by Russell Ferguson, Associate Curator, Museum
of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; an essay by critic and
curator Joshua Decter; and an introduction by Kate Bush,
Senior Programmer, The Photographers Gallery.
IMAGE:
Cathrine Opie,
Justin Bond, 1993
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