JTF (just the facts): A total of 31 photographs, framed in white and unmatted/matted, and hung against white walls in a series of galleries on the main floor and the second floor. (Installation shots below.)

The following works are included in the show:

• 7 c-prints, 2024, 2025, sized roughly 39×48 inches, in editions of 5+2AP
• 1 c-print, 2025, sized roughly 48×43 inches, in an edition of 5+2AP
• 1 c-print, 2024, sized 94×49 inches, in an edition of 5+2AP
• 3 c-prints, 2009, sized roughly 42×56 inches, in edition of 5+2AP
• 1 c-print, 2009, sized roughly 46×60 inches, in an edition of 5+2AP
• 1 c-print, 2016, sized roughly 17×21 inches, in an edition of 5+2AP
• 17 color Polaroids, 2003, sized roughly 4×3 inches, unique

Comments/Context: The spiraling ebbs and flows of actual creativity make the idea of a smooth arc of ongoing artistic development altogether difficult or even unlikely. For every bold new idea that pushes an artist forward in a new direction, there might be a matching path followed down to a frustrating dead end or a retrenchment that returns to earlier ideas that are somehow still unfinished. And so artists keep going – learning, innovating, and recycling, as they wrestle with the ideas that give them inspiration.

Anne Collier has been diligently chasing her overlapped interests in appropriation, female representation, photographic ephemera, self-help and motivational materials, cartoons and comics, women with cameras, and indirect portraiture over the past decade, hitting her marks with gallery shows of new work every few years (in 2021, reviewed here, 2018, reviewed here, 2016, reviewed here, and 2012, reviewed here), as well as with consistent participation in major institutional group shows and art fairs. And while her new show does deliver a handful of fresh works made in 2024 and 2025, it feels more like a moment of consolidation and settling in her now well-established career, rather than a burst of exploration or experimental risk taking.

Most of the new works connect back to an ongoing series titled “Developing”, continuing to explore a visual motif that Collier began in 2009 with a single self-portrait. Each image features an enlarged photograph of the sitter’s left eye, which has then been produced as an 8×10 black and white print, which then sits in a darkroom developing tray against an enveloping black backdrop. Each eye is cropped and isolated (in a manner not dissimilar from the way Bill Brandt did it back in the early 1960s), but looks back at us with directness, creating a link between viewer and subject that passes through both the physical and conceptual layers of Collier’s photographic process. The project’s title can of course be read in multiple ways, from the literalness of the photographic infrastructure seen as a framing device in the pictures to the more psychological idea of a person captured in an instant by the camera but changing and evolving over time. Collier’s recent subjects include various artists and friends, as well as a few comic book isolations which create links back to works made in the past few years. And one new image leaves the photographic paper essentially blank, the emergent image not yet visible, making the layered idea of “developing” all the more mysterious. Seen together, the works feel like a continuation or a progression to her series, rather than a variation that attempts something new.

The other new work in the show returns to Collier’s interest in the materials from self-help classes and workshops, and in the text-based interchanges that take place between these printed objects and the viewer. Here she unspools a cassette tape with the title “Are You Out of Your Mind?”, the tape twisting and bending as it sculpturally drifts down the wall. While the tape motif has been explored by a number of contemporary artists (including Christian Marclay), Collier’s version cleverly doubles the unraveling, making the falling apart both physical and emotional.

The rest of the works on view here skip backwards in time, with the loose theme of portraiture tying the choices together, glancing across a few earlier projects, including a 1-2-3 additive series of images of Normal Mailer’s biography of Marilyn Monroe. Most of the inclusions reach all the way back to the early 2000s, when Collier was living in Oakland, California. Apparently Collier made these early images in a psychic store downtown that was outfitted with a modified Polaroid camera that the owner claimed could capture a sitter’s “aura”. Over several years, Collier brought various friends and visiting artists to the shop and had their portraits made with this special camera, resulting in a series of dark headshot setups bathed in misty colors, seemingly “documenting” the flow of psychic energy emanating from the people.

While these images do connect back to the visual illusionism of 19^th century spirit photography, it’s hard to see them as more than novelty pictures, even when the subject is John Baldessari, Mike Kelley, Tomma Abts, Thomas Hischhorn, or the artist herself. The most engagingly mystical of these images are blanketed in moody fogs, with clouds of blue, orange, and green wandering in the foreground and obscuring the faces; in a few cases, shifting rainbows of smoky color seemingly fight for a kind of emotional dominance. And while we might like to imagine an actual correlation between a sitter and his or her color field, the causality here is entirely suspect, leaving us with works that feel entertainingly odd and fun, but conceptually slight.

In many ways, Collier feels like she is stuck in neutral in this show, effectively reworking themes and ideas that have long engaged her, but not yet using them as a bridge to somewhere else. Perhaps in time, we will look back at this show as a short transition (or coalescing) period in her career, when she encouraged older more established motifs to run their course, before stepping forward to a new path.

Collector’s POV: The prints in this show are priced between $15000 (individual Polaroids) and $48000 (largest print of cassette tape). Collier’s work has become more consistently available in the secondary markets in the past few years, with recent prices ranging between roughly $5000 and $101000.