The Human Body and the Corpus of Los Angeles Intertwine in Catherine Opie's harmony is fraught @ Regen Projects

105 Freeway in harmony is fraught by Catherine Opie in Los Angeles

Catherine Opie, 105 Freeway, 1994, 1994/2024 © Catherine Opie, Courtesy Regen Projects, Los Angeles

Catherine Opie’s eleventh exhibition with Regen Projects, harmony is fraught presents over sixty photographs never shown publicly before, drawn from over thirty years of making pictures in and of Los Angeles. We see a deeply singular diary of Opie’s world—especially her early years as an emerging artist in the 1990s—intertwined with the complex public life of the city she made her home, from its signature freeways and landmarks, like the Hollywood sign, to scenes of activism and surfers at the beach. Together, they collectively trace a profoundly personal story, as well as the evolving drama and common grandeur of Los Angeles itself, a singular assembly of constructions, conflicts, and communities.

 
 

Installed in carefully considered constellations, photographs of freeways and bridges connect and encircle images of more private destinations, portraits of intimates, and telling interiors. Opie likens the literal, tender, resilient human body to the great corpus of the mutable city, always growing, aging, breaking, standing firm—another body with its own queer logic. Curiously, despite the quarter of a century or more that separates us from the moment of their making, many of these images seem to proffer the same city we know now. Likewise, we see subjects yearning for many of the same suspended desires or imperiled freedoms we seek today, evidencing a constancy (or stasis) that can be both touching and deeply unsettling.

harmony is fraught is on view through March 3 @ Regen Projects, 6750 Santa Monica Blvd. Los Angeles

"Art after Stonewall, 1969–1989" @ New York University’s Grey Art Gallery & the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art

Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprisings, Art after Stonewall, 1969–1989 is a long-awaited and groundbreaking survey that features over 200 works of art and related visual materials exploring the impact of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) liberation movement on visual culture. Presented in two parts—at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery and the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art—the exhibition features artworks by openly LGBTQ artists such as Vaginal Davis, Louise Fishman, Nan Goldin, Lyle Ashton Harris, Barbara Hammer, Holly Hughes, Greer Lankton, Robert Mapplethorpe, Catherine Opie, Joan Snyder, and Andy Warhol. On view at the Grey Art Gallery from April 24 through July 20, 2019 and at the Leslie-Lohman Museum from April 24 through July 21, 2019, the exhibition is organized by the Columbus Museum of Art. Art after Stonewall, 1969–1989 is on view through July 20 at New York University’s Grey Art Gallery and the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. photographs

One Day At A Time: Manny Farber And Termite Art @ MOCA In Los Angeles

One Day At A Time is inspired by American painter and film critic Manny Farber and his legendary underground essay “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art” (1962). One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art features approximately thirty artists and more than 100 works of painting, sculpture, photography, film, video, and sound dating from the 1950s to the present. The exhibition is conceived as a cross between a monographic exhibition and a group show—an experiment in exhibition-making in the spirit of Farber’s call for an art of “both observing and being in the world.” The exhibition will open on October 14 and is on view through March 11, 2019 at The Museum of Contemporary Art 250 South Grand Ave, Los Angeles. photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper