Anne Collier

Gallery Baton is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by the New York-based artist Anne Collier (b. 1970, Los Angeles) from 19 November to 23 December, 2021. This is Collier’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, and her first solo exhibition in Korea.

Anne Collier has been recognized internationally for her complex body of work that considers our social and cultural relationships with images and with the medium of photography itself. Central to this project is Collier’s ongoing consideration of the emotional and psychological attachments we develop with images, and how these (auto)biographical narratives relate to photography’s inherent relationship with memory, melancholia and loss. Throughout her work Collier seeks to privilege the relationship between gender and image-making, whilst simultaneously maintaining a tension between the ’objective’, almost forensic-like depiction of her subjects and the often fraught and highly emotive nature of the images and objects that she re-presents.

At Gallery Baton Collier presents works from her ongoing - and related - recent series Filter; Woman Crying (Comic); and Tear (Comic). Collier’s Filter works expand upon her long-standing consideration of the analog photographic process and the mechanics at play in the production, construction and distribution of images. In the Filter works, Collier starts with a greatly enlarged detail of an image of an emotionally distraught woman sourced from a romance comic book. She then applies a Kodak Color Print Viewing Filter on top of these images, to create a series of ‘frames’ around the recurring or repeated images. The Kodak Color Print Viewing Filter was a pre-digital technical device designed to assist with color correction when making photographic prints in the darkroom. Collier’s resultant Filter works depict sequential images that suggest a liminal space somewhere between the photographic and the cinematic: between a still and a moving image.

Alongside the works from the Filter series Collier presents recent works from her ongoing Woman Crying (Comic) and Tear (Comic) series. These works are also based around imagery sourced from vintage American romance comic books. Exclusively marketed to an adolescent female readership, the comic books’ clichéd narratives paradoxically served to reinforce the notion of a subservient and eternally suffering female subject. Self-consciously acknowledging the early work of Roy Lichtenstein and the subsequent revisions of Lichtenstein’s iconography by both Richard Hamilton and Sturtevant as departure points, Collier’s Woman Crying (Comic) and Tear (Comic) consist of greatly enlarged and isolated images of women’s tear-filled eyes and graphic depictions of individual tears.

Writing about the Woman Crying (Comic) series in 2018 the art historian Tom McDonough observed: “With these works we are in the realm of the extreme close-up … At this level of engagement, we become engrossed by the details of the printing process itself, with its separation and overlay of cyan, magenta, and yellow dots and its inky black that sits on top of these colors, defining contours and the dense thickets of eyelashes and brows. We even glimpse the grain of the cheap paper on which these panels were printed, losing ourselves between the heightened emotional state depicted, its stylized representation, and the mechanical means by which it has been reproduced.”

Anne Collier currently lives and works in New York. She received a BFA from CalArts, Valencia, in 1993, and an MFA from UCLA, Los Angeles, in 2001. Her work was previously exhibited in Korea at the Gwangju Biennale (2010); the Daegu Photo Biennale (2018); and at Gallery Baton, Seoul, in the 2020 exhibition, A Little After The Millennium. Collier’s work was the subject of a survey exhibition at the Sprengel Museum, Hanover (2018), that traveled to Fotomuseum Winterthur (2019). Other recent solo museum exhibitions include: FRAC Normandie, Rouen (2017); and a major survey organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2014), which traveled to the Hessel Museum of Art, CCS Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (2014); the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2015), and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2016).

Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, US; the Whitney Museum of American Art, US; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, US; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, US; the Hammer Museum, US; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, US; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, US; the Art Institute of Chicago, US; the Walker Art Center, US; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada; Centre Georges Pompidou, France; FRAC Normandie Rouen, France; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Moderna Museet, Sweden; and Tate, UK, among others.