ART CITIES:New York-Catherine Opie

For over 30 years, Catherine Opie has captured often overlooked aspects of contemporary American life and culture. One of the most important photographers of her generation, her photographic subjects have included early seminal portraits of the LGBTQ+ community, the architecture of Los Angeles’ freeway system, mansions in Beverly Hills, Midwestern icehouses, high school football players, California surfers, and abstract landscapes of National Parks, among others.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Lehmann Maupin Gallery Archive

Catherine Opie in her solo exhibition “Rhetorical Landscapes” continues her examination of the current American political landscape and the moving image, a visual technology that she utilized in her first film “The Modernist”. The photographs “Rhetorical Landscapes” feature the Okefenokee swamps found in southern Georgia and northern Florida. At first glance, each image appears to be a dense verdant landscape, however, upon closer inspection these photographs reveal unique attributes (an owl staring at the viewer from the center of the composition, or an alligator half submerged in the swamp’s black water) that show the often unseen life that is at risk in these endangered spaces. For Opie, the swamp is emblematic of the dire environmental and human vulnerability that is a result of climate change, ecological preservation issues, and the damage to the Environmental Protection Agency enacted by the Trump administration. This portrayal of the swamp also suggests the common phrase, “draining the swamp,” used by the current administration to refer to the “elimination” of long-standing corruption within the U.S. government. Opie has stated that swamps are peaceful ecosystems that do not need to be drained but are themselves at serious risk, along with our democracy, due to the very real corruption that has only grown over the last four years. The exhibition also features a collection of animated films that Opie refers to as “political collages” displayed on human-size monitors that resemble smartphones. These works are composed of magazine cutouts of political figures, animals, environmental destruction, commerce, and urban sprawl that Opie has accumulated over the course of Trump’s presidency. These images are animated against the background of a hand-painted blue grid, referencing both modernist art history and the political collages created by the Bauhaus in Weimar Germany. Each animation addresses a contemporary political issue (nationalism, climate change, immigration, gun control, or the disappearance of natural resources) that is visualized through the gradual accumulation of images that ultimately form a complete digital collage. These animations recall Opie’s recent series, “The Modernist” where the protagonist creates a newsprint collage while slowly destroying modernist buildings across Los Angeles. As with “The Modernist” the politics of landscape are on display in this new body of work. Opie argues that, like magazines that are disappearing as we become a screen-driven society, the swamp land of the southern United States will also slowly begin to vanish as a result of insufficient environmental protection legislation and climate change.

Catherine Opie has produced a body of work that examines and often exposes the ideals and norms surrounding American identity and the concept of the “American Dream” while giving visibility to communities overlooked within those narratives. She first gained recognition during the 1990s for her series of studio portraits titled Being and Having, in which she photographed gay, lesbian, and transgender individuals drawn from her circle of friends and artists. Opie has also traveled extensively across the country exploring the diversity of America’s communities and landscapes, documenting quintessential American subjects including L.A.’s freeway system, high school football players, the 2008 presidential inauguration, and U.S. National Parks. In her portraits and landscapes, Opie often establishes levels of ambiguity—of identity and place—through manipulating the focus of her images through cropping, blurring, intense close ups or distance shots, and playing with orientation, often swapping landscape and portrait formats.

Info: Lehmann Maupin Gallery, 501 West 24th Street, New York, Duration: 6/7-26/9/20, Days & Hours: by appointment, www.lehmannmaupin.com