Celebrating the opening of Georgia O’Keeffe, the Tate Modern’s major retrospective of the American artist, Canadian cool girl photographer Petra Collins pays homage to the American desert in a new film. Inspired by O’Keeffe’s landscapes, Collins’ film features surreal sets and some of her favorite muses including Lee Armoogam, Barbara Ferreira, Seashell Coker, Maia Ruth Lee, and Ajani Russell.
Collins first came across the work of the famous desert-scape painter in art class, and has been a fan of her work ever since. “I was so drawn to her work. The shapes and lines, how she took a simple American landscape and made it into this soft but also super-hard object. Her paintings are pretty realistic, but they’re also very surreal,” Collins told Vogue.
Interweaving snippets of O’Keeffe’s voice with that of her female friends, Petra counters the popular narrative that O’Keeffe’s work was about sexuality and the female form, when in reality it was just about the landscape she saw in front of her. “They could tell you how they painted their landscape, but they couldn’t tell me how to paint mine,” the voices echo dreamily.
Georgia O’Keeffe comprises over 100 of the artist’s best-known paintings, from her animal skulls and paintings of magnified flowers to her New Mexico desert landscapes, including Jimson Weed/White Flower No.1 (1932) the most expensive painting by a female artist ever sold at auction.