For her biggest public art project yet, a commission-in-progress for the new federal courthouse in downtown Los Angeles, the artist Catherine Opie has chosen one of the most romantic images of the American West—Yosemite Falls—as the subject of grandly scaled work that will bring some natural majesty to the interior of the steel-and-glass building due to open next summer.
Opie has put her own spin on the image, finding a scene with gentle rushing waters and capturing the waterfall’s reflection in the river below, which visually complicates the scene. And she does something that would have seemed perverse to Ansel Adams or Carleton Watkins: she cuts up her sublime subject into six parts to be hung on different floors of the building, visible from a central atrium.