‘Drain the swamp’? Artist Catherine Opie says swamps are beautiful
Catherine Opie joined the UCLA Department of Art faculty in 2001. One of the preeminent artists of her generation working with photography, Opie is known for her evocative images of contemporary America that have been featured in major museum exhibitions around the world. Opie has chosen a myriad of subjects throughout her career, including the S/M community, city buildings, domestic life, high school football players, surfers, and President Barack Obama’s first inauguration. At UCLA, Opie teaches graduate and undergraduate students in photography.
"To utter the word “swamp” is to evoke muck or morass. In comic books and Hollywood films, swamps are the watery abodes of slimy anthropomorphic monsters. In current events, the word serves as a shorthand for Washington politics, the sort of festering quagmire politicians of all stripes regularly threaten to drain.
Politics give swamps a bad name.
Swamps — or wetlands, as they are also known — are teaming hubs of biodiversity, serving as home to sturdy cypress trees, gracious wading birds and bubbling assemblages of microorganisms. These are landscapes that are “less about beauty than subtlety and originality,” writes journalist Michael Grunwald of the Everglades landscape in his 2007 book, “The Swamp.” “It was less ooh or aah than hmm. ... There was always more to the Everglades than met the eye.”
Los Angeles artist Catherine Opie is intrigued by swamps and what they obscure, not to mention the ways in which the word “swamp” can conjure both images of nature and internecine battles on Capitol Hill. There is “the rhetoric of ‘drain the swamp,’” she says, seated before a steaming cup of tea in her roomy Lincoln Heights studio, “but the swamp is also a beautiful, vulnerable ecosystem.”
Opie, 58, has, over the years, trained her camera in equal measure on people and landscapes — be it the intimates of her queer BDSM circles, or the vast expanses of steely California oceans bearing the diminutive silhouettes of shivering surfers. Now she has waded, literally and metaphorically, into the swamp.
The artist’s new series, “Rhetorical Landscapes,” on view at Regen Projects in Hollywood through April 4, features images of swamps made by Opie during a residency in Florida early last year. In these photographs, she captures inky waters, swaying mosses and the astonished face of an owl doing its best to fade into the vegetation. Also included in the show are new digital collages that bring together fragments she clips out of newspapers and magazines into vibrating stop-motion animations.
On a brisk afternoon early last month, Opie, who in addition to being an artist is also a longtime UCLA professor (late last year, she became the first to hold the art department’s endowed chair in art), took time to talk about how she ended up hanging out in the swamps — and the TV shows she likes to watch to get away from them."— Carolina Miranda, Mar. 4, 2020
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Los Angeles Times website.
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