ANNE COLLIER: PORTRAITS
Anton Kern Gallery is pleased to present Portraits Anne Collier’s seventh solo exhibition at the
gallery.
May 6 – June 21, 2025
Early in her career Collier described her practice as a form of “deflected self-portraiture,” wherein the objects that she documented - including her now celebrated works incorporating images of record sleeves, magazine covers, book pages, etc. - embraced the idea that they might be avatars or surrogates for the artist herself. The current exhibition will include key works from this era, including Studio Floor (Marilyn, Norman Mailer) and Untitled (This Charming Man), both 2009. Yet throughout her practice Collier has periodically returned to the genre of portraiture itself: creating images - depictions and representations - of other individuals, including friends and artists in her immediate circle.
For her latest exhibition at Anton Kern, Collier presents works made between 2003 and 2025, structured around two important series: her rarely seen Aura Polaroid portraits produced in Oakland, CA, between 2003 and 2004, and her ongoing series Developing – close-up photographic ‘portraits’ of people’s eyes suspended in darkroom developing trays - which was initiated in 2009.
Collier’s Aura portraits were created during the artist’s time living in Oakland, California. They were made in a downtown Oakland psychic store using a modified Polaroid camera that its creators claimed could both capture and visualize the sitter’s energy field or aura. Each of the aura portraits is accompanied by a computer-generated printout, ‘analyzing’ the resulting hyper-saturated chromatic images. Over the course of two years Collier took local friends as well as artists visiting the Bay Area to the psychic store to sit for an aura portrait. Eventually, she made more than forty such portraits, including those of artists John Baldessari, Mike Kelley, Frances Stark, Cerith Wyn Evans, Vincent Fecteau and the writers Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian, among others.
In her text written to accompany this exhibition Alissa Bennett concludes:
“It’s interesting to think about the difference between looking with the eye and looking with the camera. The camera seems to me like it’s a simple tool, like a can opener or a pair of scissors, a device that pries the lid off something so that we can see inside of it. I think Anne knows that, which is why she uses it to isolate the brief moments when feelings like love or loneliness or longing rush up from inside of us and flood our surfaces, things that are too fast or too fugitive for us to register in the maelstrom of everyday life. Maybe if we had apertures instead of pupils, we could quiet things down and see what she sees …”