Anne Collier: Women with Cameras

About

Studio Voltaire has commissioned New York-based artist Anne Collier in a two-part project Women with Cameras, a slide projection piece of a selection of source material from her ongoing Woman with a Camera series and an associated artist's book detailing this extensive amassed material. Combining still-life photography with techniques of appropriation, Collier creates meticulously arranged compositions of found objects and pop culture paraphernalia. These items including magazines, postcards, posters and record covers, are photographed against the stark surfaces of the artist's studio in an exact and formal manner. Under these conditions, the objects come under close scrutiny, revealing a set of formal and psychological associations that frame recurrent tensions around power and gender. Collier revisits the subject of the objectified female in many of her works, often appropriating European photography magazines from the 1970s and 80s, which frequently sexually objectified their female subjects. Collier's works highlight the materiality of photographic reproduction and the deployment of images within print culture, opening up a fertile dialogue between personal experience and our contact with culture, cliché and stereotype. Collier's solo exhibition at Studio Voltaire will be the artist's first presentation in a London public gallery, and will give audiences a rare opportunity to view Collier's source material in her gallery exhibition and artist's book. Designed and co-published by New York-based publishers Karma, and distributed by Walter Köenig, the monograph will launch in Spring 2015 in London and New York.