New York artist Anne Collier deals in the currency of prêt-a-porter emotion. Found images of sunsets, flawless women and self-help mantras have long been the subjects of her work. These desirable images are the kind of all-encompassing and open-ended evocations that drive us to buy flights, jeans and gym memberships.
As evinced with this new collection, Collier’s high-production prints work to subtract from these images, photographing them typically as book spreads in minimal settings. Alienated, stripped of context and often objectified, the appropriated images adopt a slightly tragic air.
Collier has photographed the covers of two 1970s Zoom magazines shot by fashion photographer Jerome Ducrot. Featuring camera-yielding women in various states of undress, these covers have been photographed by Collier in a sanitised, white space. The vacuity of the ladies’ provocative poses is matched only by the hyper-falsity of her blank setting, and in some strange act of negation, they seem to cancel each other out.
Yet something idiosyncratic remains. It is not as straight forward as the seductive appeal of their ‘gloss’; there’s more a caustic humour. Having reined in their connotations, Collier then sets up a strange confusion between the politics of these ‘old’ images with their crude visual economies, and an appeal to their ‘new’ contemporary surfaces.
Following on from her self-help works of earlier years, Collier includes a selection of photographs of rag-eared educational posters. Like those that may have once adorned the walls of a GCSE History classroom, their questioning tone poses such conundrums as ‘From whose viewpoint are we seeing, reading or hearing?’, ‘Evidence’, questions another, ‘How do we know what we know?’ Moving from image to text, these works appear to question agents of power, bringing dated modes of imagining uncomfortably into the present.