Anne Collier
Woman Crying, Comic
signed and numbered (on the reverse)
ditone print on paper, in a walnut frame
37 x 45 cm.
Published in an edition of 100 + 20 AP + PP
Woman Crying, Comic
signed and numbered (on the reverse)
ditone print on paper, in a walnut frame
37 x 45 cm.
Published in an edition of 100 + 20 AP + PP
Woman Crying, Comic
signed and numbered (on the reverse)
ditone print on paper, in a walnut frame
37 x 45 cm.
Published in an edition of 100 + 20 AP + PP
Anne Collier, installation view featuring another Woman Crying, The Modern Institute, Glasgow, 2020. Photograph: Anne Collier/The Modern Institute.
The weeping woman is a recurring motif in art. It feeds into the misogynistic fantasy of the so-called “weak” sex and its propensity for hysteria and madness. In her “Women Crying” series, the artist Anne Collier, who was born in Los Angeles in 1970 and now lives in New York, probes the clichéd image of the dame breaking out in tears. With an analog camera, she photographs existing depictions of women cry- ing, as found on vinyl record covers and in newspapers and romance comic strips, focusing on material from the Cold War era with its traditional gender roles and isolating certain details such as the area around the eye or individual teardrops.
The specific quality of the series is unmistakable in her anniversary edition “Woman Crying, Comic (for Texte zur Kunst)”: On the one hand, the close-up on the detail of the tear-filled and fear- stricken eye fringed by a dense cornice of lashes brings out the dot pattern of the four-color print, a charac- teristic process in newspaper and comic-strip production. On the other hand, it shatters the patriarchal frame that contains the woman in the image, extricating her from her assigned place in society.
Born in 1970 in Los Angeles, Anne Collier studied photography at the California Institute of Arts, Valencia, and the University of California Los Angeles. COllier’s photographs offer a straightforward presentation of found images and printed ephemera, and explore themes of appropriation, iconography and surrogacy.
Collier’s work has been exhibited in solo shows at such venues as Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn, Germany; Nottingham Contemporary, United Kingdom; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and The Modern Institute, Glasgow. She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions including Day for Night, Whitney Biennial, New York; 10,000 Lives, Gwangju Biennial, South Korea; Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; New Photography 2012, Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Photo-Poetics, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Collier lives and works in New York.