© William E. Jones
Casa dell’ Architettura Acquario Romano Piazza Manfredo Fanti , 47 00185 Roma Italie
American CITIES, William E.Jones - Catherine Opie
Curated by Camilla Boemio
The exhibition should be read as an introduction to the American city in its crisis and rebirth in a dual phase in which its fast disappearance is preferred to the plasticity of the historic center of the thriving Chicago. Expose two of the most famous international artists, both Americans, who, too, devoted his artistic landscape of industrial and urban areas, with hints and new options: E. Jones William and Catherine Opie.
Camilla Boemio is a writer , and a curator , among the exhibitions curated : Mnemosine – The Atlas of images (2009) Centro Arti Visive Pescheria , CITIES – places visionaires (2009) Auditorium Arte/Parco della Musica preview of the Festa of Architecture , Critica in Arte (2010) MAR Museum , Sensational Architecture (2010) Auditorium Arte/Parco della Musica Festa of Architecture of Roma , After the Crash (2011) Orto Botanico Museum of Roma and Before the Crash(2011) Exeter (UK) ISWA European Project , CITIES (2011) TAM.
Some American cities are experiencing rapid changes, giving shape to the city-islands developed in the seventies by the architect Oswald Ungers Berlin, and now assumed for the future of Detroit, with a center that maintains its functions and then a series of urban centers more or less densely populated, surrounded by land returned to nature and urban agriculture.
A master of ironic archival recovery, William E. Jones in Shoot Don't Shoot adapts a law enforcement instructional film that trains officers to decide whether or not to fire their guns at "a black man wearing a pinkish shirt and yellow pants."
Jones is based in Los Angeles , and has exhibited, among many others had major exhibitions at the White Cube at The Modern Institute, Glasgow, at the Palais de Tokyo, MOCA, the 12th Istanbul Biennial.
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© Catherine Opie
Since the early 1990s, Catherine Opie has produced a complex body of photographic work, creating series of images that explore notions of communal, sexual, and cultural identity. From her early portraits of queer subcultures to her expansive urban landscapes, Opie has offered profound insights into the conditions in which communities form and the terms in which they are defined. All the while she has maintained a strict formal rigor, working in lush and provocative color as well as richly toned black and white. Influenced by social documentary photographers such as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and August Sander, Opie underscores and elevates the poignant yet unsettling veracity of her subjects.
For the Roma show was chosen a part of Chicago serie ( 2004 ) .
In 2004 Catherine Opie returned to the city streets, shooting a new group of works for her American Cities project that explored downtown Chicago. As in earlier series, the compositions in Chicago (2004) emphasize the horizontality of the urban environment and are entirely devoid of people, which Opie achieved by photographing in the dead of night as opposed to early morning, as in Mini-malls (1997–98) or Wall Street (2001). Opie again highlighted structures that would commonly be ignored: a run-down church, railway tracks disappearing beneath office buildings, buses and trailers in a nearly empty parking lot, and an underground section of Wacker Drive. At the same time, she included a number of the city's most iconic buildings, but in such a way as to undercut their authority as architectural monuments. One image focuses on the spiraling parking deck abutting the John Hancock Center, rather than the skyscraper itself. Another shows the Rookery Building's entrance shrouded in scaffolding, revealing neither the building's nineteenth-century facade nor its Frank Lloyd Wright lobby. In yet another image the residential towers of Bertrand Goldberg's Marina City are all but lopped off.
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© William E. Jones
Opie photographed the Chicago series from the point of view of an individual wandering the city streets on foot, but unlike other series that are part of American Cities—including Mini-malls and Wall Street—Chicago delves into the kind of romantic beauty that the artist had so far employed only for natural settings, such as her landscapes in Icehouses (2001) and seascapes in Surfers (2003). Dramatically lit against the darkened sky, the empty Chicago streets appear overcome with a mysterious ambiance.
Sponsor :
William E. Jones
Grew up in Ohio and now lives in Los Angeles. He has made the films Massillon (1991), Finished (1997), and Is It Really So Strange? (2004), videos including The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography (1998), and many other moving image works. He has had retrospectives at Tate Modern, Anthology Film Archives, Austrian Film Museum, and Oberhausen Short Film Festival. Jones’s books include Tearoom (2008), Selections from The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton (2008), Heliogabalus (2009), Killed: Rejected Images of the Farm Security Administration (2010), and Halsted Plays Himself (2011).
Catherine Opie
Catherine Opie was born in Sandusky, Ohio, in 1961. At an early age, she discovered the work of photographer Lewis Hine, who documented the plight of child laborers at the turn of the 20th century. Inspired by Hine’s photographs, she requested a camera for her ninth birthday, and was given a Kodak Instamatic by her parents. She immediately began photographing her family and neighborhood, exhibiting a fascination with community that continues to this day. She received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1985 and an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California, in 1988. Her thesis project, Master Plan (1986–88), examined the planned communities of Valencia, from construction sites and advertisement schemes, to homeowner regulations and the domestic interiors of residents’ homes.
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© Catherine Opie
Her early series Being and Having (1991) and Portraits (1993–1997) depicted her friends in the lesbian and gay community in Los Angeles, mixing traditional portrait photography with less traditional subjects. In 1994, with Freeways, she made images of the highways around her Los Angeles home that exclude people and automobiles from the compositions. She continued this exploration of the contemporary landscape three years later with Mini-malls. In the Domestic (1999) series, she returned to the lesbian community for her subjects, photographing couples in their homes. Polaroids (2000) documents the Performance work of Ron Athey in large-scale prints. Traveling outside the Los Angeles area to find new landscapes and cityscapes to photograph, she photographed the New York financial district, once again emptied of people, in Wall Street and scenes of Minnesota in Icehouses and Skyways (all 2001). A 2003 series of portraits entitled Surfers focuses on the California surfing subculture. For her series Children (2004), Opie returned to the studio and to her signature highly focused portraits, this time of children set against bright solid backdrops. In 2004 the artist extended her study of unpeopled urban sites initiated in 1997, now grouped under the title American Cities, with black-and-white photographs of Chicago. For the series In and Around the Home (2004–05), Opie turned to her home and community as a microcosm for the larger political and social conflicts surrounding the presidential election.
Opie has had solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (1997), Saint Louis Art Museum (2000), the Photographers’ Gallery in London (2000), Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (2002), Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut (2006), Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (2006) and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (2008), among other venues. Her work has appeared in the Whitney Biennial (1995 and 2004), Féminin-Masculin: Le sexe de l’art at Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (1995), Rrose is a Rrose is a Rrose: Gender Performance in Photography at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1997), Melbourne International Biennial (2000), Moving Pictures at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2003), SITE Santa Fe Biennial (2006), Family Pictures at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (2007), and Global Feminisms at the Brooklyn Museum (2007). She has taught at Yale University and at the University of California in Los Angeles. She lives and works in Los Angeles.