On show until October at Lismore Castle Arts in County Waterford, Ireland, Anne Collier’s monographic exhibition Eye is a collection of works made between 2007 and 2022, examining the concept of ‘gaze’ and its relation to the human psyche. Imagery of eyes, sourced across genres such as photography manuals, advertisements, comic books, film stills, and album sleeves complement Collier’s intimate self portraits in the exhibition. In recognition of the deep ties between the medium of photography and our cultural identity, the New York-based artist’s works deconstruct the emotional and psychological bonds we develop with images and how they intersect with photography’s intrinsic links to memory, melancholy and loss. Underlying the exhibition is a tension between the objective, clinical act of documentation and the raw emotional response evoked by the images.
Anchoring Eye are Collier’s photographic compositions Filters (2021), which expand upon her curiosity into the analog photographic process and the intricacies underpinning the production, construction and distribution of images. Inspired by the imagery of vintage American romance comics from the 1950s to the 1980s, Collier underscores the hackneyed tropes that relegated women to the status of subservient and unendingly suffering subjects. The anguished female figure, enlarged in great detail, receives a Kodak Color Print Viewing Filter — a pre-digital device formerly used to correct colour in photographic prints — to establish a sequence of frames around the recurring images. Conceived by Collier in numerous CMYK colour iterations, the series resides in a transitional realm between the photographic and the cinematic, hovering in a threshold between the static and the moving image.
Alongside their bold presence as a part of Collier’s first exhibition in Ireland, Filters (2021) also appears inside A Magazine Curated By Erdem alongside an interview between the artist and Laura Burlington, the proprietor of Lismore Castle Arts.
Below is an excerpt from their conversation.
Eye runs through October 29, 2023 at Lismore Castle Arts, Ireland.