Anne Collier, Folded Madonna Poster (Steven Meisel), 2007
Chromogenic print
127 x 164.5 cm
Athens, Private collection
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Anne Collier considers herself a still life photographer using as her subjects other photographs and found media. A once-folded poster of Madonna from a photograph taken by Steven Meisel for her 1993 single ‘Bad Girl’ is pinned in the top two corners to a white wall. By photographing found objects and appropriated imagery, Anne Collier questions the ways in which these images are presented and perceived, aiming to elicit “a sense of emotional or psychological uncertainty” through her image-making process. In Folded Madonna Poster (Steven Meisel), she transforms the object into the subject and asks us to join her in analyzing the process of perception and presentation. The title of the work highlights that this is a picture within a picture; we know what we are looking at (a folded poster of Madonna) and by whom the image was originally taken (Steven Meisel). In acknowledging these two aspects, Collier draws our attention to how this image was initially presented and consumed. She challenges how photography structures our ways of seeing by drawing our attention to these mechanics as seen in the present work.

Anne Collier (b. 1970, Los Angeles) currently lives and works in New York. Collier’s work was the subject of a survey exhibition at the Sprengel Museum, Hanover, Germany, (2018), that traveled to Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland (2019). Other recent solo museum exhibitions include: FRAC Normandie, Rouen, France (2017); and a major survey organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2014), which traveled to the Hessel Museum of Art, CCS Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY (2014); the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2015), and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada (2016). Her work is included in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Art Institute of Chicago; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and the Tate, London, among others.