The Sea Ranch Artist Residency: Film Screening of “The Modernist”

This event has reached its capacity and has sold out…Thank you!  On Saturday, July 23, The Sea Ranch Artist Residency  will host a special screening of the film, “The Modernist”, at the Knipp-Stengel Barn at 4:00 p.m. Tickets are available here. The film, written and directed by Catherine Opie, introduces this celebrated photographer and filmmaker as she begins her exploration of the landscape, architecture and spaces of The Sea Ranch for the SRAR 2022 Residency Program. A limited number of tickets are available, and all tickets must be reserved in advance. Following the screening, the audience is invited to join in a conversation with artist Catherine Opie and internationally noted architect Sharon Johnston as they discuss Utopic Dreams.

For more than thirty years, Catherine Opie’s work has captured often overlooked aspects of contemporary American life and culture. One of the most important photographers of her generation, her photographic subjects have included early seminal portraits of the LGBTQI community, the architecture of Los Angeles’ freeway system, mansions in Beverly Hills, Midwestern icehouses, high school football players, California surfers, and abstract landscapes of National Parks, among others.

“The Modernist” presents a dystopic view of Los Angeles, a city that has figured prominently in Opie’s work over the years. The film is in conversation with Chris Marker’s radical 1962 photo-roman, La Jetée, which utilizes still photography to tell a story of longing, time travel, and the terror of nuclear apocalypse. Opie’s film continues this dialogue, employing similar formal and narrative structures to a different end. Composed of over 800 black and white still images, the 22-minute film unfolds with swift pacing, exploring contemporary issues like natural disasters, the breakdown of the American political system, global tragedies, and the Los Angeles housing crisis. The film stars Stosh, a.k.a. Pig Pen, a close friend of Opie’s who has appeared in many of her photographs, as a struggling artist who is obsessed with landmark mid-century modern architecture. Each still captures the subject and his world from multiple angles and vantage points, creating a lyrical cinematic effect and leaves the viewer questioning whether what transpires is an act of destruction or a dream.

Opie, a Los Angeles-based artist, works with photography, film, collage, and ceramics. Her work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States and abroad and is held in over 50 major collections throughout the world. She was a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow recipient and recently returned from the American Academy in Rome as the Robert Mapplethorpe Resident in Photography for 2021. Opie was also awarded The Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art Medal in 2016, The Julius Shulman Excellence in Photography Award in 2013 and a United States Artists Fellowship in 2006. In September of 2008, the Guggenheim Museum in New York opened a mid-career exhibition titled, Catherine Opie: American Photographer. She debuted her film, The Modernist, at Regen Projects, Los Angeles in 2018. Her first monograph, “Catherine Opie”, was recently published by Phaidon in June of 2021. Opie received a B.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute, and an M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts in 1988. She holds the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Endowed Chair in Art at UCLA where she is a professor of Photography and also Chair of the Department of Art.