Same Difference is a cinematic collaboration between two artists raising young sons with same sex partners. Renowned photographer Catherine Opie and award-winning filmmaker Lisa Udelson became interested in the lack of children’s voices in California during the debate over the anti-gay marriage bill Proposition 8. Same Difference focuses on the opinions of children with same sex parents, ranging in age from two to eighteen. They speak with humor, insight, intelligence and passion about their lives and their families. The film includes their parents and grandparents, including the filmmakers, who daily navigate the landscape of queer family. The interview process becomes its own character of sorts, as subjects reveal themselves in unexpected ways. Additionally, the film is punctuated with vintage film footage to create irony and recognition of the historical representation of family.
For the past twenty years Opie has wandered the North American continent, photographing communities and deserted urban landscapes in a desire to document the now obsolete ideals of the American dream. From her early studio portraiture of transsexual and queer communities to her polaroids of urban American life from In and Around Home, Opie embraces classic genres of documentaryphotography to reveal something new about contemporary American identity.
This event marks the UK debut of Same Difference, a cinematic collaboration between Catherine Opie and Lisa Udelson.
This event is generously supported by Stephen Friedman Gallery.
Catherine Opie is an American artist based in Los Angeles, where she is also a professor of photography at UCLA. Opie has exhibited in museums worldwide. Her recent exhibition Empty and Full opened at The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston earlier this year. The Guggenheim Museum also hosted a major mid-career survey of her work in 2008. In and Around Home, another solo exhibition, toured around the United States to the Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield; the Orange County Museum of Art, California; Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art; and Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro.
Emma Hedditch is an artist who lives between London and New York. Her work in performance, video and self-publishing focuses on radical practices of daily life that transform culture and distribution of knowledge as political/public action. Most recently 'All Lives Liveable' a script for Community Without Propinquity, Milton Keynes Gallery and Approximate At A Distance installation, AGYU, Toronto. Emma is part of the Cinenova Working Group organisers of Cinenova, feminist film and video distributor and visiting artist at the Art Academy in Copenhagen and Dutch Art Institute.