Anne Collier

Conceptual photographer Anne Collier (American, b. 1970) combines still-life photography with techniques of appropriation in meticulously arranged compositions. Photographed against flat, plain surfaces in her studio, found objects — record covers, magazine pages, appointment calendars, postcards — reveal Collier’s interest in the mass media and popular culture of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Informed as much by West Coast conceptual art as by commercial product photography and advertising, her deadpan pictures (which are often humorous and subtly self-reflexive) present a set of formal and psychological associations that frame recurrent tensions around power and gender. Collier’s works often investigate the culture of photography, the conventions of nude photography and the act of seeing. Deeply invested in the history of photography as a medium of art and intellectual inquiry, Collier’s work questions and recontextualizes clichéd popular imagery, alternately evoking her own personal history and a more general nostalgic attraction to found material. Collier received a BFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1993 and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2001. She has lived and worked in the Bay Area, San Francisco and in New York City. 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, CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco and the Nicole Klagsburn Gallery, New York.