2016.4.2, Anne Collier, Introduction, Fear, Anger, Despair, Guilt, Hope, Joy, Love/Conclusion, 2002/2004

GENERAL DESCRIPTION

Anne Collier’s photographs are cool and detached, rigorously circumscribed in format or presentation, and almost always neutrally record objects that already exist in the world. Likewise, Collier’s photographs tend to address subjects germane to the world of photography while simultaneously questioning clichés and tropes within that sphere. Underlying much of her work, however, are personal struggles that find cathartic outlets in her photographs, eliciting empathy from the viewer and asking the audience also to emotionally invest in these same images. The events that have largely defined Collier’s private life and have provided subject matter for her as an artist, are the death of her mother from breast cancer when she was five and the passing of her father twenty years later. For an only child, being orphaned at such a relatively young age was a considerable trauma that influenced much of her early work.

Knowing these painful circumstances in Collier’s life, the viewer can infer that the many photographs dealing with psychology, especially of the popular, self-help variety, are evidence of a struggle to come to terms with loss. Introduction, Fear, Despair, Guilt, Hope, Joy, Love/Conclusion (2002/2014), shot like most of Collier’s images as a straightforward product photograph against a seamless backdrop, devoid of inflection or fancy lighting, depicts a vacuum-formed plastic clamshell box of eight cassette tapes. Each tape bears a label with one of the words in the title, presumably narrated by a psychologist instructing listeners to conquer (or in the case of Hope, Joy, and Love, to embrace) that particular feeling. However, we as viewers quickly turn from intuiting Collier’s own problems, as inferred by the image, to confronting our own relationship to these states of being.

Adapted from

Gabriel Ritter, DMA unpublished material, 2015.

NOTES

DMA unpublished material = acquisition justification
updated provenance and geo x refs
Photographer Anne Collier’s process is one of indexing and editing, carefully finding objects of widely circulated images, photographing them, and displaying them with works in dialogue with one another. Shooting her images from above and carefully lining the plane of her camera with the object, Collier’s practice does not leave room for improvisation. Rather, to avoid any distortion of the found image, her photos are carefully planned and executed. In her own words, Collier “appl[ies] this somewhat restrained and essentially objective approach to subject matter that is more ambiguous and unstable (emotional, psychological, etc.).” The result is a tension between the formal and seemingly removed nature of how the image was captured, with the image’s emotive qualities hidden under the cool, objective surface. More than a ‘re-photography’ of images, Collier refers to her work as still-life, a photographic object, and while the subject may be a stock photograph, Collier’s approach is never an appropriation as it is always clear that her photographs are of found material.
Anne Collier’s work has been the subject of numerous solo shows at international institutions such as the Aspen Art Museum; The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Modern Institute, Glasgow; and Nottingham Contemporary, UK. Collier has participated in numerous group exhibitions as well, and in 2014, participated in an artist residency at the Hydra Workshop of prominent art collector Pauline Karpidas. Her work belongs to notable public collections in New York such as The Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and international institutions including the Tate Modern, London; FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais, France; and Shpilman Institute for Photography, Tel Aviv. Collier has lectured widely and has been invited as visiting faculty at Yale University, New Haven, CT; Parsons School of Design, New York; and the Art Center, Pasadena, California.

Catalogue essays

Artist/designers

Cultures

Geography

Process/materials

Historical periods

Individuals

Subject terms

RELATED OBJECTS

PROVENANCE

Until 2016: Marc Foxx Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

From 2016: Dallas Museum of Art, purchased from above [1]

[1] See copy of check #2329 in Collections Records Object File 2016.4.2

AUDIO ASSETS

VIDEO ASSETS

IMAGE ASSETS

WEB RESOURCES

ARCHIVAL RESOURCES

FUN FACTS

TEACHING IDEAS

RULES

Apply to objects where number equals 2016.4.2

General Description

Anne Collier’s photographs are cool and detached, rigorously circumscribed in format or presentation, and almost always neutrally record objects that already exist in the world. Likewise, Collier’s photographs tend to address subjects germane to the world of photography while simultaneously questioning clichés and tropes within that sphere. Underlying much of her work, however, are personal struggles that find cathartic outlets in her photographs, eliciting empathy from the viewer and asking the audience also to emotionally invest in these same images. The events that have largely defined Collier’s private life and have provided subject matter for her as an artist, are the death of her mother from breast cancer when she was five and the passing of her father twenty years later. For an only child, being orphaned at such a relatively young age was a considerable trauma that influenced much of her early work.

Knowing these painful circumstances in Collier’s life, the viewer can infer that the many photographs dealing with psychology, especially of the popular, self-help variety, are evidence of a struggle to come to terms with loss. Introduction, Fear, Despair, Guilt, Hope, Joy, Love/Conclusion (2002/2014), shot like most of Collier’s images as a straightforward product photograph against a seamless backdrop, devoid of inflection or fancy lighting, depicts a vacuum-formed plastic clamshell box of eight cassette tapes. Each tape bears a label with one of the words in the title, presumably narrated by a psychologist instructing listeners to conquer (or in the case of Hope, Joy, and Love, to embrace) that particular feeling. However, we as viewers quickly turn from intuiting Collier’s own problems, as inferred by the image, to confronting our own relationship to these states of being.