Walls, Windows and Blood: Catherine Opie in Naples

There is something enigmatic about the artist Catherine Opie. A straightforward, candid manner, and the sometimes autobiographical nature of her pieces, unite to form bodies of work, exploring themes from the beauty of deserted Los Angeles highways and members of the Queer leather community to perhaps her most famous project ‘700 Nimes Road’, which portrayed Elizabeth Taylor through her home and possessions. There is no one who depicts Americana quite like her, through a uniquely affectionate but not passive lens, challenging the values at the country’s core. 

Catherine Opie: ‘Walls, Windows and Blood’

In her latest series ‘Walls, Windows and Blood’, now on view at Thomas Dane Naples, Opie has turned her focus to the Vatican Museum, where she completed a residency during the pandemic years. The access she had to the space, empty of people, gave her the opportunity to study the building, its art and its architecture. The six weeks she spent making a relationship with this building, the centre of the Catholic Church, with all its nuances, histories and controversy,  conceptualised this series.  

‘In ideas around my other bodies of work, it’s always about the specificity of identity. But what do we know about that? What is iconic? How do we view it differently? How do we begin to think about it?’ Opie asks. ‘Spending that amount of time within that world, I was able to just distil it down to my own Holy Trinity.’

One can’t think about the Catholic Church without thinking about its wealth, power, history and its secrecy, all of which are being called into question through the passing of time. Changes in society  mean people, no matter their level of faith, expect truthfulness from institutions.

‘The idea of the Holy Trinity, and it ended up just working on a really universal level to think about what we’re talking about now in the world in relationship to transparency, what is what is our relationship to the idea of hypocrisy of these of these places of power?’

During the making of ‘Walls, Windows and Blood,’ the bodies of 75 murdered indigenous children were discovered in Canada in an incident linked to the Church. The Pope expressed sympathy but did not apologise; as sadly many more bodies were found, an apology was issued. This resulted in the only photograph of the Pope in this series titled ‘No Apology’.  

The walls in the series, tall, imposing and topped with CCTV, evoke the power of the institution. The windows raise many questions and the blood acts as a familiar religious motif. Pierced bodies, arrows, the emotive beauty of the art in the Vatican, from the Sistine Chapel and the Raphael Rooms to the countless masterpieces in its collection. Divided into four grids of images these photographs, complete with paint cracks and paint texture, provide a mediation on faith, history and iconography. Opie’s body of work has mostly been concerned with the United States, so this is different terrain for her as a seasoned artist.

‘I didn’t feel like a tourist and I felt like the body of work had its depth that went beyond that but I think that that’s a very hard thing to do,’ she explains. ‘I think that’s because of the relationship to my curiosity, around identity, both through buildings and structures, and certain ideologies within one’s own country and what it means to be raised in a country and born in a country and all of that.’

There is something meditative about this show, in some ways different from but also intrinsically a part of what Opie does in exploring and documenting what she is drawn to intellectually and what moves her. 

Next up for Opie is a show at Reagan Projects in LA celebrating 30 years and 30 years of her being with the gallery including her queer club photos. 

‘I’m really excited because it’s might be the most weirdly photographic show I’ve ever done,’ she says. 

‘Wall, Windows and Blood’ is on view in Naples until 18th November

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