Anne Collier
March 5-27
Opening Friday March 5th 6-8:30pm
Jack Hanley is pleased to present Anne Collier's first exhibition with the gallery. The photographs in the exhibition embrace a self consciously broad range of subject matter through which Collier explores her ongoing concerns of (self) portraiture, landscape, and "emotional conceptualism." Collier employs familiar or quotidian subjects to realize an underlying emotional instability in her images. Through subtle changes in scale or orientation Collier invites us to question our own familiarity with her subjects. In Collier's own words her work might "be productively thought of as a form of displaced self-portraiture. “Despite its autobiographical and sometimes melancholic content my ultimate goal is to describe the middle ground of emotion."
This current work includes images that address this interest in a number of ways. Karen, 2004, Frame, 2002, Real Life Experiences of Big Breasted Women, 2004, and Side 1/Side 2, 2004, incorporate images of 'found' objects that simultaneously invoke both autobiographical and universal narratives: the destructive nature of adolescence; representations of idealized family life; 1970's soft-core pornography; and the false hope of the self-help industries. In her more formal self-portraits such as Reflection, 2003, in which the artist's reflected image can be seen in one of her own earlier works, or Mirror, 2004, in which a slightly less then life-sized image of the artist has been reversed, Collier directly alludes - in both deadpan comic and self-deprecating ways - to the self-portrait's complex relationship with narcissism. In other works, such as Anger, 2004, in which the artist's hands rest in the negative hand prints of maverick film director Kenneth Anger; and Friends, 2003, a group portrait of some of Collier's Los Angeles-based friends (that includes the writer Dennis Cooper and artists Jason Meadows, Dave Muller, and Jennifer Bornstein) Collier seeks to both locate and implicate her own identity (as an artist) within historical and contemporary milieus.
Anne Collier graduated with an MFA from UCLA in 2001, and currently lives and works in the Bay Area. Her work is in the collections of SF MoMA; the Los Angeles County Museum; and the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art. Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions in Europe and the United States, including Bay Area Now III, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco and Likeness: Portraits of Artists by Other Artists currently at the CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco (Feb 27 - May 8, 2004). Her work can be seen later this spring at the Nicole Klagsburn Gallery, New York.