Anne Collier
21 Jan - 20 Feb 2010
ANNE COLLIER
Jan 21 – Feb 20, 2010
January 6, 2010, New York— For her first full-scale solo exhibition in New York, Anne Collier will present a concise body of recent photographic works and a new slide-projection installation. Collier’s photographic works, which typically incorporate images of found everyday objects, including magazines, record sleeves, jigsaw puzzles, used books, analogue darkroom equipment, and abandoned self-help manuals, operate at the threshold between the personal and the universal. Informed as much by advertising and technical photography of the late 1960s and 1970s as more recent approaches to photoconceptualism, her work invites the viewer into an animated web of formal and psychological associations. Collier’s works explore questions of perception and representation and the mechanics of the gaze. Negotiating biography, nostalgia, and melancholia Collier’s work establishes a tension between her employment of an almost “forensic” photographic objectivity and the often highly subjective and emotive content she focuses on. In the gallery’s second space Collier presents a slide-projection piece entitled Woman With A Camera (35 mm) that was developed during a residency at Artpace, San Antonio, TX. The work sequentially projects 18 individual frames from the 1978 film Eyes of Laura Mars. Transferred from 35mm film stock into 35mm slides the work translates cinematic time into something akin to photographic ʻtime. In this durational piece, Collier presents a fragmented narrative sequence, which focuses on a specific moment in the film where Laura Mars, a fashion photographer portrayed by Faye Dunaway, has a horrific premonition of a murder whilst taking a photograph. Describing this work, writer Tom McDonough, in an essay published in Collier’s recent artist’s book Woman With A Camera (35 mm), articulates the complex associations the work provokes:
Laura’s active looking, a displaced form of excessive or dangerous desire, is punished: her usurpation of voyeurism calls forth extremes of murderous sadism. Collier mobilizes these references, returning to the conjunction of woman and photographic apparatus as the site of a knot of overdetermined meaning. Her aim is not so much to expose the ideology of sexual difference behind the cliché, than to explore the very interminability of such taboos in seeing. Anne Collier’s work has recently been presented in one-person shows at Artpace, San Antonio (2009), Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn (2008), Presentation House Gallery, Vancouver (2007). Since 2001, she has exhibited in galleries in London, Madrid, Berlin, Los Angeles and San Francisco. After her much noticed participation in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, Collier’s work has been included in group shows at Kunstraum Niederoesterreich, Vienna; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Centre d’Art Contemporain, Charmande, France; Aspen Art Museum (all 2008); Broad Contemporary Art Museum, Los Angeles; Midway Art, Minneapolis; and Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA (2009). Collier studied at CalArts and UCLA, California. She was born in Los Angeles and currently lives and works in New York.
The exhibition will open on Thursday, January 21 and run through Saturday, February 20, 2010. The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10 am - 6 pm
Jan 21 – Feb 20, 2010
January 6, 2010, New York— For her first full-scale solo exhibition in New York, Anne Collier will present a concise body of recent photographic works and a new slide-projection installation. Collier’s photographic works, which typically incorporate images of found everyday objects, including magazines, record sleeves, jigsaw puzzles, used books, analogue darkroom equipment, and abandoned self-help manuals, operate at the threshold between the personal and the universal. Informed as much by advertising and technical photography of the late 1960s and 1970s as more recent approaches to photoconceptualism, her work invites the viewer into an animated web of formal and psychological associations. Collier’s works explore questions of perception and representation and the mechanics of the gaze. Negotiating biography, nostalgia, and melancholia Collier’s work establishes a tension between her employment of an almost “forensic” photographic objectivity and the often highly subjective and emotive content she focuses on. In the gallery’s second space Collier presents a slide-projection piece entitled Woman With A Camera (35 mm) that was developed during a residency at Artpace, San Antonio, TX. The work sequentially projects 18 individual frames from the 1978 film Eyes of Laura Mars. Transferred from 35mm film stock into 35mm slides the work translates cinematic time into something akin to photographic ʻtime. In this durational piece, Collier presents a fragmented narrative sequence, which focuses on a specific moment in the film where Laura Mars, a fashion photographer portrayed by Faye Dunaway, has a horrific premonition of a murder whilst taking a photograph. Describing this work, writer Tom McDonough, in an essay published in Collier’s recent artist’s book Woman With A Camera (35 mm), articulates the complex associations the work provokes:
Laura’s active looking, a displaced form of excessive or dangerous desire, is punished: her usurpation of voyeurism calls forth extremes of murderous sadism. Collier mobilizes these references, returning to the conjunction of woman and photographic apparatus as the site of a knot of overdetermined meaning. Her aim is not so much to expose the ideology of sexual difference behind the cliché, than to explore the very interminability of such taboos in seeing. Anne Collier’s work has recently been presented in one-person shows at Artpace, San Antonio (2009), Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn (2008), Presentation House Gallery, Vancouver (2007). Since 2001, she has exhibited in galleries in London, Madrid, Berlin, Los Angeles and San Francisco. After her much noticed participation in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, Collier’s work has been included in group shows at Kunstraum Niederoesterreich, Vienna; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Centre d’Art Contemporain, Charmande, France; Aspen Art Museum (all 2008); Broad Contemporary Art Museum, Los Angeles; Midway Art, Minneapolis; and Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA (2009). Collier studied at CalArts and UCLA, California. She was born in Los Angeles and currently lives and works in New York.
The exhibition will open on Thursday, January 21 and run through Saturday, February 20, 2010. The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10 am - 6 pm