Anne Collier @ The Modern Institute
As part of Glasgow International 2014, New York-based artist Anne Collier continues her feminist investigations into the photographic mechanics of gaze and subjectivity in her first Scottish exhibition at the Modern Institute.
Mixing the iconic with the quotidian, Collier collects and photographs images of women – women with cameras, extreme close ups of body parts, eyes, lips and nude, faceless figures. These cultural artefacts of female iconography are harvested from the media detritus of pop culture, film and commercial printings, such as postcards, magazine covers, open books and promotional film stills, and then photographed in a sterile, matter of fact style in her studio, as if documenting evidence of the female gaze.
Collier’s photography of photography is a radical act of feminist post-structuralism achieved through spatial ambiguity and the tension between what is depicted and the nature of its depiction. In this way, the original print is stripped of its intended commercial purpose, deconstructing the invisible male gaze within and repurposing the image for new, feminist meanings. Women’s faces are often looking, obscured by a camera, turned away from the lens or cut off from the image completely in disembodied close ups.
Without the face, arguably the most fetishised part of the female anatomy and loaded signifier of the feminine, the female subject cannot be displayed as a mythic, unproblematic whole to be consumed and objectified by the male gaze. The stand-out image is Women with a Camera (Postcard, Verso Recto) a postcard depicting a Kenyan girl gazing back at us with a tourist’s camera. By making visible the framing of the postcard, we are confronted with its colonial objectification of the Turkana “girl” and its patronising language (“Say cheese before I click!”). Collier replaces this with a postcolonial image of a woman defiantly looking back at us. [Rachel Bowles]
Until 7 Jun