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...
To explore the boundaries between artwork and audience, Gimhongsok created a series of sculptural performances in which a person wearing an animal costume poses in the gallery...
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...
Like many of Pascal Shirley’s photographs, Oakland Girls aestheticizes a dingy rooftop and a cloudy sky...
The print Patient Admission, US Naval Hospital Ship Mercy, Vietnam (2010) features an Asian Buddhist monk and an American Navy Solider on board the Mercy ship –one of the two dedicated hospital ships of the United States Navy– sitting upright in their chairs and adopting the same posture...
Bowers’ Radical Hospitality (2015) is a sculptural contradiction: its red and blue neon letters proclaim the words of the title, signaling openness and generosity, while the barbed wires that encircle the words give another message entirely...
Rudolph Schindler’s designs, part of a practice he called “Space Architecture,” marry interior with exterior and space with light...
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...
Custom-built for a silent film star in 1934 in Santa Monica, the Sten-Frenke House is an idiosyncratic icon...
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...
Tania Libre is a film by Lynn Hershman Leeson centered around renowned artist Tania Bruguera and her experience as a political artist and activist under the repressive government of her native Cuba...
In this photographic series, Yto Barrada was interested in the logos of the buses that travel between North Africa and Europe...
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...
Tree on the Former Site of Camera Obscura (1996) belongs to a series of large-scale photographs of trees taken by Graham and depicts a particular species that lives in Northern California...
For the past two decades, An-My Lê has used photography to examine her personal history and the legacies of US military power, probing the tension between experience and storytelling....
Using the seminal 1958 film Vertigo as a launchpad, Lynn Hershman Leeson explores the blurred lines between fact and fantasy in VertiGhost , a film commissioned by the Fine Arts Museums in San Francisco...