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The Arts Intel Report

Dreaming of Home

Catherine Opie, Self-Portrait/Cutting, 1993.

Sept 7, 2023 – Jan 7, 2024
26 Wooster St, New York, NY 10013, United States

Catherine Opie’s seminal photograph Self-Portrait/Cutting (1993) is the springboard for an exhibition about queer and trans domesticity. The image shows the back of Opie’s body, naked down to her waist. She is standing in front of a wall papered in dark green. Her back is still bleeding where a house, a cloud, and a stick-figure couple holding hands has been carved between her shoulder blades. It looks like an image a child would bring home from school. We know both figures are women just as we know which bathroom to enter: triangular skirts. In this one image Opie asks her viewers to hold two opposing feelings—the warm, quiet feeling of domesticity and the uncomfortable reality that queer people cannot safely recline in that sensation. By placing the human body at the center of their works, 20 artists—including Nicole Eisenman, Christina Quarles, and Cajsa von Zeipel—come together to explore the ways Opie’s powerful work remains relevant. —Clara Molot