In this work, a woman sits on a couch with her shirt pulled up to expose her pierced nipples, which are connected by a chain. She wears an expression of both pleasure and intensity as she points a gun at someone or something outside of the frame. Raven (gun) (1994) is not so much threatening as full of sexuality and potential energy. Opie often photographs her friends, of whom Raven is one, and here she captures Raven in the intimate act of role playing. Instead of keeping such activities behind closed doors, Opie brings sexuality fully into view in an effort to question and widen our definition of normalcy.
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.
Constructed out of metal or glass to mirror the size of FedEx shipping boxes, and to fit securely inside, Walead Beshty’s FedEx works are then shipped, accruing cracks, chips, scrapes, and bruises along the way to their destination...
Herculine’s Prophecy by Juliana Huxtable features a kneeling demon-figure on what appears to be a screen-print, placed on a wooden table, which has then been photographed and digitally altered to appear like a book cover, with a title and subtitle across the top, and a poem written across the bottom...
Wallace says of his Heroes in the Street series, “The street is the site, metaphorically as well as in actuality, of all the forces of society and economics imploded upon the individual, who, moving within the dense forest of symbols of the modern city, can achieve the status of the heroic.” The hero in Study for my Heroes in the Street (Stan) is the photoconceptual artist Stan Douglas, who is depicted here (and also included in the Kadist Collection) as an archetypal figure restlessly drifting the streets of the modern world...
The Tower of Babel is an installation of large-format photographs that forces the audience to occupy a central position through its monumental scale...
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...
Lambri’s careful framing in Untitled (Miller House, #02) redefines our understanding of this iconic mid-century modernist building located in Palm Springs, California...
Ponderosa Pine IV belongs to a series of large-scale photographs of trees taken by Graham and depicts a particular species that live in Northern California...
Like many of Pascal Shirley’s photographs, Oakland Girls aestheticizes a dingy rooftop and a cloudy sky...
The artist writes about her work Borrando la Frontera, a performance done at Tijuana/San Diego border: “I visually erased the train rails that serve as a divider between the US and Mexico...
Office Work by Walead Beshty consists of a partially deconstructed desktop monitor screen, cleanly speared through its center onto a metal pole...
Untitled (City Limits) is a series of five black-and-white photographs of road signs, specifically the signs demarcating city limits of several small towns in California...
7-headed Lalandau Hat by Yee I-Lann is an intricately woven sculpture evoking the ceremonial headdress worn by Murut men in Borneo...
The version of Frontier acquired by the Kadist Collection consists of a single-channel video, adapted from the monumental installation and performance that Aitken presented in Rome, by the Tiber River, in 2009...
In this photographic series, Yto Barrada was interested in the logos of the buses that travel between North Africa and Europe...
Golia’s Untitled 3 is an installation in which a mechanical device is programmed to shoot clay pigeons that are thrown up in front of a white wall...
603 Football Field presents a soccer game played inside a small student apartment in Shanghai...
#17 Pink is a photogram, a photographic image produced without the use of a camera...
In the six-minute single-channel video Higher Horse , Kate Gilmore perches herself on top of a tall pile of plaster blocks, in front of a pink colored wall with vein-like streaks of red...
Lockhart’s film Lunch Break investigates the present state of American labor through a close look at the everyday life of the workers at the Bath Iron Works shipyard—a private sector of the U...