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Anne Collier, German Still Life #1 (Postcard), 2012 C Print
Courtesy of the artist and Anton Kern Gallery, New York

VISIT
Anne Collier’s Solo Show at Anton Kern, New York

April 13 2012
10:41 AM

With her deceptively straightforward practice of photographing existing objects that incorporate photographic imagery, Anne Collier produces complex and thoughtful works time and again. In this, her third solo presentation at Anton Kern Gallery in New York City, the photographs are comprised of images of open books, calendars, postcards and album covers frequently populated by eyes, cameras and advertisements for cameras in which women appear in various stages of undress. Stylized sexism from the 1970s and 1980s seeps from these images, and Collier seems to offer them as a form of nuanced critique. The large, framed photographs hold monumental space in the gallery, and the found objects that Collier has captured hover within them, photographed as they are leaning or pinned against the wall in her studio. The objects are bathed in cool, neutral light and, while these sparse images reference the tone of photo-conceptual practice, Collier introduces questions about perception and representation in a manner that is uniquely her own, both objective and free of artifice, yet infused with a compelling autobiographical tenderness that is hard to ignore. (Alhena Katsof)