Anne Collier

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. Collierʼs 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. Collierʼs works explore questions of perception and representation and the mechanics of the gaze. Negotiating biography, nostalgia, and melancholia Collierʼs work establishes a tension between her employment of an almost ʻforensicʼ photographic objectivity and the often highly subjective and emotive content she focuses on.

In the galleryʼs 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.ʼ 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 Collierʼs recent artistʼs book Woman With A Camera (35 mm), articulates the complex associations the work provokes:

Lauraʼs 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.