Multiple works by Catherine Opie installed

Catherine Opie is perhaps best known for an infamous series of photographic self-portraits that put her lesbianism at center stage. In one of these she is dressed in leather pants, but is naked the west except for a leather hood and a collar. A row of 46 steel needles stuck in both arms and the word "pervert" cut into her chest. Another portrait taken of her bare back, exposes a fresh cutting into her skin of a chilike drawing of two women holding hands in front of a house with the sing from behind a cloud. The most recent self-portrait shows Opie nursing her son Oliver, the scars from the "pervert cutting still legible against her skin. In each composition, Opie places herself in front of a colorful, richly ornate damask backdrop, bringing to mind Renaissance portraiture, in particular the enigmatic 1533 Double Portrait of Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve better known as The Ambassadors) by Hans Holbein the Younger. Its intimate setting and abundance of marital symbolism, combined with the unconven- tional characterization of Dinteville as "male" and de Selve as "female," has by some been interpreted as a portrait of two male lovers. It is not certain whether Opie had Holbein in mind when she began the series, but it is tempting to compare this painting to Opie's self-portraits. Both offer a "queer" take on a conventional theme and share a controlled composition within a complex his torical and cultural context. Both portraits are alluringly seductive. Opie considers her work to be a "kind of twisted social documentary. Her pictures of people and places hover at the edge of normalcy: houses in Bel Air and Beverly Hills with enormous entrance doors have sexual connotations while surfers photographed after returning from the water display orgasmic exhaustion. In 1998, Opie took a trip across the U.S. to photograph lesbian families and couples. As in her earlier series that features female friends wear- ing fake facial hair, transgendered women and men, drag queens, and leather dykes, these portraits document the self-constructed identities of people and the places they live in without the sensationalism and voyeurism that they might be subjected to by other photographers. Opie's exquisite portraits of children of fellow artists and gay couples-whose innocence seems artificially exaggerated by the carefully chosen background colors-also show her as an adept colorist. Despite their appearance of "normality," which at first may seem unlike Opie's previous portraits, these images continue her exploration of identity, sexuality, and privacy from her own perspective as a gay artist and mother. Along with her latest body of photographs, "In and Around the Home," which examines America's political climate of the last three years and its impact on Opie's own South Central Los Angeles neighborhood, they establish her as one of the most honest por traitists of American life today.
Text written by Curator Klaus Ottmann for the exhibition catalog.