Catherine Opie (Past Project)

The Shores, 2013
7509 Girard Avenue
17' 3" x 25' 10"

Catherine Opie's piece, The Shores, is deeply rooted in the history of photography. The new landscapes draw upon this trajectory - both contemporary and historical. In addition to utilizing motifs that informed the California Pictorialists, these works reference the painterly tradition. Images of iconic landscapes float in abstraction and are reduced to elementary blurred light drawings. The viewer no longer relies on traditional markers of recognition of place, but instead on the visceral reaction to the sensate images Opie captures. These painterly, poetic, and lyrical visions resonate with oblivion, the sublime, and the unknown.

Catherine Opie's work is deeply rooted in the history of photography. She was born in 1961 in Sandusky, Ohio. She received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts and her BFA from San Francisco Art Institute. She is a professor of photography at the University of California, Los Angeles. Opie explores how the photographic lens can both document and augment how different phenomena are perceived. She is interested in the complex relationship between mainstream and underground culture with a focus on sexual identity, especially the Los Angeles leather-dyke community. Her work seeks to connect her subjects with the different spaces they inhabit linking individuals to their larger communities. Her work spans a wide breadth of subject matter including portrait, studio, and landscape photography.

Opie has had solo shows at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus; and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; among other venues. Her work has appeared in the Whitney Biennial (1995 and 2004), the Melbourne International Biennial, and SITE Santa Fe Biennial. Opie lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

Photos by Philipp Scholz Rittermann