Anne Collier

Anne Collier (born Los Angeles, 1970) is an American visual artist working with appropriated photographic images. Describing Collier's work in Frieze art magazine, writer Brian Dillon said, "Collier uncouples the machinery of appropriation so that her found images seem weightless, holding their obvious meaning in abeyance."

Writing in The New York Times, Karen Rosenberg said "Anne Collier’s photographs of vintage books, album covers, posters and other ephemera, taken in an antiseptic white studio, look studiously detached at first. But after some time they reveal themselves as sensitive and involved responses to an earlier generation's visual culture."

In 1993, Anne Collier received her BFA from the California Institute of the Arts, in Valencia, California. In 2001 Collier received her MFA at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She currently lives and works in New York City. She is currently represented by Anton Kern Gallery in New York, The Modern Institute in Glasgow, and Galerie Neu in Berlin.

Anne Collier, Retrospective in 2014–2015

In 2014, a retrospective of Collier's work opened at Center for Curatorial Studies, or CCS Bard Galleries at Bard College. The exhibition traced her career from 2002 to present. Encompassing around forty works, the exhibition presents several recurring subjects and themes that have dominated Collier’s practice over the past decade.

The exhibition includes the notable Woman with a Camera series, an ongoing project that tackles the perception of women in the photographic medium. In the series, Collier use common mechanisms found in advertising as she isolates old forms of media—photos, pages from books and magazine, cassette tapes, and record albums—and reshoots them. The re-photographed material typically features a woman holding a camera and by photographing this woman, Collier suddenly switches the subject from the woman photographed to the viewer, thus making the viewer question and reflect their position as a viewer.

As Osman Can Yerebakan, art writer for Art Observed, aptly described Colliers' the Woman with a Camera series: "Film stills of actresses such as Faye Dunaway, Jacqueline Bisset or Marilyn Monroe with cameras in their hands adopt the position of the gazer, staring at the viewer as the roles exchange. These iconic women, commonly positioned as the objects of male gaze, confront the voyeuristic notions of the public eye with cameras in their hands, repositioned as the voyeurs. Attributing physical and emotional power to the camera as a metaphor, Collier celebrates the status as the gazer these women reclaim through their own hands."

This exhibition has traveled to Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago on November 22, 2014 through March 8, 2015, and will travel to Aspen Art Museum on April 2 through July 15, 2015, and then at The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto from September 23, 2015 to January 10, 2016. The exhibition was organized by curator Michael Darling, and was accompanied by essays by Darling, curator Chrissie Iles, and the novelist Kate Zambreno.

Typically, Collier creates photos from other existing photographic materials to examine the ways meaning and cultural values are embedded in photographic images. Her work typically involves arranged still life compositions of found photographic material (such as record covers, magazine pages, appointment calendars, and postcards).

Re-occurring themes in Collier's work include pop culture and psychology, consumerism, feminism, gender politics, clichés & tropes, and conventions of commercial photography, autobiography, and the act of looking or seeing.

Collier's works are held in the collections of over twenty public museums, including the following:

• Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
• The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
• Centre national des arts plastique, Paris, France
• Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollings College, Winter Park, FL
• FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais, Dunkerque, France
• The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA
• Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
• Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA
• Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA
• Miami Art Museum, Miami, FL
• Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden
• Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL
• Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA
• Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla, CA
• Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
• Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Poland
• San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA
• Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY
• Shpilman Institute for Photography, Tel Aviv, Israel
• Tate Modern, London, UK
• UBS Art Collection, New York, NY
• Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN
• Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY