Summer 2004
Visual Road Trip
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Untitled #13
(Surfers), 2003, by
Catherine Opie. Courtesy of Regen
Projects, Los Angeles
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The 13 photographs of surfers off Malibu parallel an earlier body
of work, Opie's Icehouses series of 13 photographs of brightly painted
ice-fishing shacks on a frozen lake near Minneapolis. Spending hours
outdoors with her 8x10 camera fighting frostbite and frozen film
in blizzard conditions, Opie caught the horizon line above the frozen
lake that stretches across the winter landscape, barely separating
gray sky from ice and snow. Both series reflect Opie's fascination
with temporary communities. "Like surfing, the icehouses create
temporary communities on the water," explains the artist. "For
both the Pacific Ocean and this lake, you have to be a millionaire
to live on the land. But the water and the frozen lake are public
spaces. A stoner guy can be next to a neurosurgeon. They end up
being part of the same community."
She has photographed the urban sprawl of Los Angeles, with its
tangle of freeways and ubiquitous mini-malls surrounded by multiethnic
signage. She has shot Beverly Hills mansions and tract homes in
master-planned Valencia. For a series she titled A Long Way
from Paris, she spent two years tracking with her camera the
gradual dislocation of an immigrant community in her MacArthur Park
neighborhood as corridors for the new Metro Rail were tunneled underneath.
She captured the stark emptiness of Wall Street with the ill-fated
twin towers in the background just three weeks before 9/11. She
brought into view the enclosed skyways that crisscross downtown
Minneapolis.
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