- Sylvia Plath, The Applicant, 1962.
"Anne Collier’s exhibition brings together a selection of her recent and historically significant photographs, spanning the last 20 years. The juxtaposition of self-portraiture and images of pop cultural artefacts, which often depict women, forms an oblique mediation on Collier’s artistic lineage, touching on elements of biography.
Collier’s selected artefacts in some way attempt to define the women behind them, and, in turn, her photographing of them speaks to their significance to her own life and thinking. They are linked by a repackaging of female identity and image. May/Jun 2009 (Cindy Sherman, Mark Seliger), 2009, plays with this process itself, centring the trappings of celebrity ‘cool’ and self-presentation – not looking at the camera, smoking, wearing black. Sherman has consistently interrogated and played with female archetypes in culture, ever since producing her Untitled Film Stills, 1977–80, a series of self-portraits which adopted the aesthetics of 20th-century film. This work elaborates on and complicates Sherman’s oeuvre to critique the cultivation of fame and gender stereotypes within the mass media. The piece underlines the dual strands at play in the exhibition, both the process of identifying with images and creating identities in images.
Collier’s works have often walked the line between the personal and universal, and that tension remains consistent here with her own image woven into the presentation; an Aura Portrait, taken in a psychic store in downtown Oakland in 2003 and the artist’s own eye in Developing (Anne Collier), 2024. By pairing the latter and Developing, 2024 – which depicts a sheet of undeveloped photographic paper suspended in a developing tray – Collier aligns the moment of inspiration with the idea of self-creation. In some respects, the pieces function as indirect self-portraits. Solanas’ writing, the rainbow of aura photography, and the empty, yet seductive packaging of pop culture artefacts (evidently handled, worn or folded) serve as subtle allusions to confession, melancholy, and feminist thought – or rather they serve as both a conduit and a barrier, oscillating between superficiality and depth. Collier allows the viewer a moment to consider their own identity before each image and in that way she disappears again."
- The Modern Institute
March 14 - May 21, 2025
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