Catherine Opie sets fire to L.A. architecture in her first film
In “The Modernist,” the Opie aims a critical lens at the fetishization of midcentury modern homes
Professor Catherine Opie’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan. Her masterful portraiture and landscape photography studies the relationships between mainstream and infrequent society, with a large emphasis on sexual identity. The Modernist, Opie's first flim, is composed of over 800 black and white still images and captures the subject and his world from multiple angles and vantage points, creating a lyrical cinematic effect.
"For more than 30 years photographer Catherine Opie has challenged societal norms around gender and sexuality and shed light on overlooked subjects with her groundbreaking photographs. Her work has adorned the walls of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Hammer Museum at UCLA and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among renowned cultural institutions. Now, though, Opie is shifting her work from photographs to moving images in her first film.
Opie’s newest installation, “The Modernist,” debuted recently at Regen Projects in Los Angeles and will run through Feb. 17. The film is a montage of black and white photographs of a struggling artist obsessed with art and architecture in Los Angeles that critiques contemporary social and political issues. For Opie, “The Modernist,” is an opportunity to flesh out the housing crisis in Los Angeles and to showcase the idea of a utopia in a dystopian world.
“So there are always a few kinds of positions within my work. They are the relationship of documentation, of landscape, of portraiture and of ideas around sex of queerness,” said Opie, who has been a professor of photography in the UCLA Department of Art since 2001. “I was trying to make a piece that combined all of that, but also allowed for a narrative structure to adhere to it, which is something that you’re not necessarily able to do with just only a series of photographs.”
“The Modernist” is a 22-minute compilation of black and white photos that follow the story of a man (“Pig Pen”) — portrayed by an artist named Stosh Fila, who is a good friend of Opie’s — as he fantasizes and obsesses over Los Angeles midcentury modern architecture, and the life associated with being a successful artist. The postwar modernist homes were supposed to make affordable housing in Los Angeles more attainable and make modern design accessible, but instead these homes, some of which were designed by the likes of Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler, became beacons of the impossible.
“’The Modernist’ is in some ways a culmination of many years of not only thinking about Los Angeles as a city, but also by going back and using my good friend Stosh as a model or as a character to really kind of complicate the relationship between the body and the housing crisis,” Opie said."— Joy McCreary, Feb. 8, 2018
This post is an excerpt, read the full article at the UCLA Newsroom website.
Read more about Professor Catherine Opie.
See The Modernist at Regen Projects, on view through Feb. 17, 2018.
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