Sharp but blurred around the edges

Sometimes museums go so far out of their way to provide context for an artist’s work that they end up obscuring rather than clarifying it. That’s what happened at the Orange County Museum of Art, where “Catherine Opie: In and Around Home” assembles seven series of the gifted artist’s photographs.

OCMA co-organized the exhibition with the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Conn., where it had its debut in January. Initially the show meant to focus on just two documentary projects that had not been publicly exhibited before, the subjects of the catalog that accompanies the exhibition. But to its detriment, the show itself has swollen to almost twice the size.

“1999” is an ambitious group of 26 prints that ponder American consciousness at the brink of a new millennium. The pictures are marked by an unsettling emptiness -- landscapes (mostly) taken at a variety of locations across the country. The sun is usually low in the sky (whether it’s dawn or dusk isn’t always clear), few people are seen and a melancholic beauty is pervasive. The mood is elegiac, poignant.

The 44 images of “In and Around Home” constitute a photo essay undertaken in 2004-05 in which Opie turned the camera on her house in L.A.’s West Adams neighborhood. She lives there with girlfriend Julie Burleigh, their young son Oliver, Burleigh’s daughter Sara, and the family’s three dogs and one cat. West Adams is what real estate brokers sometimes call a “transitional neighborhood” -- once prosperous, long down on its luck, recently making a fitful comeback.

Like the year 1999, which marked the galumphing end of the so-called American Century and anticipated the anxiety-laden launch of Y2K, when a newly wired world driven by computers was supposedly poised for apocalypse, Opie’s West Adams home is a place that’s betwixt and between. The transitional tag also applies to her family that resides there -- a household that thrives in spite of rampant homophobia and denial of constitutional protections for their lives, liberty and pursuit of happiness.

When Opie was photographing in Alabama seven years ago, homosexual activity was a misdemeanor punishable by a year in prison, according to state law. By 2004, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling had rendered that law unconstitutional. But the ongoing pressures of social invisibility can be glimpsed in the foolishness of having to describe Burleigh as Opie’s “girlfriend,” with its misleading inference of casual, even adolescent transience.

The stresses and strains of a transitional time or place can produce joy and optimism, as well as confusion and tragedy. All of those (and more) are tracked in Opie’s pictures. The best of them are as atmospherically pungent as anything photographed by W. Eugene Smith or Walker Evans.

Take the untitled work that begins “1999,” a roadside rest stop in rural Alabama photographed by dawn’s early light. The lower half of the picture is empty, save for tire tracks that crisscross the sandy ground amid shallow piles of dead leaves. Newspaper and mailboxes sharing a wooden post signal correspondence and connection with a larger world. So does the homey cabin tucked beneath sheltering trees at the center, a Coca-Cola sign on its side suggesting commercial use.

At the left, bathed in morning sunshine, a circular sign rises on a tall pole. Whether it advertises a product or the roadside store is something that might be known to locals but not to other viewers. “Pure,” the sign reads in capital letters. A zigzag wreath, reminiscent of a first-prize blue ribbon at the county fair, surrounds the word.

Pure beauty? Or pure hokum? Neither is specified in this lovely country scene, but the question of purity as a value looms large over the American landscape.

Compare this photograph to “Oliver in a Tutu,” a riveting picture that turns up halfway through the second series, “In and Around Home.” The towheaded little boy stands grinning at the camera from his perch on top of a well-used kitchen chair in the laundry room. Behind him, seen through the open door, a dog on the porch sniffs the late-afternoon air while a woman sweeps the stairs leading to the backyard. It’s a familiar genre scene.

With light streaming in from behind, barefoot Oliver is dressed for play. He wears a gleaming silver-cardboard crown, bead necklace, a USC football jersey and a pink tulle ballerina skirt flecked with sequins. The question of purity as a value looms large over this domestic landscape, as surely as it did in roadside Alabama.

Here the simultaneous tug of masculine and feminine emblems is given free play. Judging from the beatific glow radiating from Oliver’s face, which is wonderfully enhanced by the luminescent light that Opie infuses throughout the photograph, the frolic is liberating and good for the soul. This is one lucky little prince.

The openhearted quality of the picture, as with many others in the series, is further amplified through juxtaposition. Among the formally composed color C-prints, Opie inserts small Polaroid pictures, all of them shot off a television screen. The first is a triptych. Reading from left to right, the fuzzy images show a glamorous heterosexual couple on a soap opera, President Bush giving a thumb’s up and a scowling female courtroom judge whose cropped nameplate reads “Dykes.”

The individual Polaroid pictures aren’t formally composed, but the sequence is. The hastily grabbed pictures have been transformed into a concise, ruminative, sharply defiant story.

Others in the group refer to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a dying Pope John Paul II, brain-dead Terri Schiavo and the purple index fingers raised by Iraqi voters. Among the large C-prints, one shows the Los Angeles Times on the family’s doorstop, dated Inauguration Day 2005. The banner headline announces: “Bush Doctrine: Spread Liberty.” When you subsequently arrive at the radiant picture of blissful Oliver, you have the unanticipated sense that Opie is following the presidential philosophy of ending tyranny -- if not in the world, then in her own family and neighborhood -- albeit in ways Bush would not likely recognize.

These two deceptively quiet photographic essays are intensely thoughtful. They are also marvelously enhanced by being shown together.

For reasons that are hard to fathom, however, their power has been diluted and diverted by a large selection -- 73 prints -- from other series, including photographs of freeways, surfers and mini-malls, as well as Opie’s thesis project when she was a student at CalArts. (She graduated in 1988.) That project documented the rapid growth of suburban Valencia, where the school is located, so its ancestral relationship to “1999” and “In and Around Home” is plain.

But so, by comparison, is its relative lack of sophistication. The inclusion of this and other well-known series would be illuminating in a full-scale retrospective. Here they seem chaotic and distracting -- terms that contradict the focused potency of the phenomenal main event.

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‘Catherine Opie: In and Around Home’

Where: Orange County Museum of Art, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach

When: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays, extended until 8 p.m. Thursdays; closed Mondays and Tuesdays

Ends: Sept. 3

Price: $8 to $10

Contact: (949) 759-1122; www.ocma.net