You might think Catherine Opie's portraits from her 'Girlfriends' series of the early 1990s would have suffered from the broadly positive change in attitudes towards gay identity over the last two decades. By current liberal standards, there's little to provoke in these measured, playful, sensitive images of Opie's friends and lovers: even when the subjects are got up in leathers or bondage gear, or displaying slowly bleeding needle skin-piercings, there's an odd lack of charge to what were once perceived as extreme, marginal and persecuted lifestyle choices.
But Opie's lens is smart enough to understand how these women manipulate or refuse to adopt particular images of femininity or masculinity. For all her portraits of lesbian friends sporting the leather boots, sleeveless vests, cropped hair and slicked kiss-curl of the 1950s male biker rebel, there are others of women who manage to avoid the cultural signs of hetero or homo – images in which a particular, blank openness is achieved between the artist and her subject, a privacy that doesn't acknowledge the demand to represent oneself, publicly, as one thing or another.
Opie recently said, in relation to her more recent series of empty motorway flyovers and public spaces, that she had previously been so committed to her project of picturing the subcultures of sexuality that she hadn't stopped to look around her at what made up the rest of the modern, social world. This subsequent fascination with scenes of emptiness appears in full force in the other series of works here, a suite of large colour seascapes, of paired sunrises and sunsets, taken from the deck of a Korean cargo liner, on its 11-day journey to California. Only at the edge of the world, perhaps, can one escape from the need and necessity of human identity – with all its conventions, roleplays and masquerades.