Since the 1990s, Catherine Opie has been recognized for her use of documentary photography to address issues of community and queerness, and the ways in which identity is shaped by architecture. Particularly resonant during the Culture Wars of the 1980s and early 1990s—a time in which the religious right tried to impose itself as a political force and cultural censor—Opie’s photographs privilege the representation of specific communities, whether the LGBT, teenagers, surfers, football players, or her group of friends who engage in sexual role playing, tattooing, and piercing.
In One Must , an image of a pair of scissors, accompanied by the words of work’s title, poses an ominous question about the relationship between the image and the text...
Iron Sorrows (1990) brings together what are for Alexis Smith common motifs and materials such as scavenged and repurposed metal, and street signage...
Bruce Conner is best known for his experimental films, but throughout his career he also worked with pen, ink, and paper to create drawings ranging from psychedelic patterns to repetitious inkblot compositions...
Towhead n’Ganga, enclosed in darkness, lorded over by the sexualized folded high priestless form reflects many of Kelley’s works, in both its compositional and semantic qualities...
In 8 Ball Surfboard (1995),Alexis Smith combines her long-term interests in California culture and conceptual assemblage...
The voids in Baldessari’s painted photographs are simultaneously positive and negative spaces, both additive and subtractive...