JTF (just the facts): A single billboard, 25×75 feet, displayed at the corner of 18th Street and 10th Avenue in Chelsea. The work is entitled Developing Tray #2 and is print on vinyl, from 2009.
Comments/Context: The High Line Billboard series is turning out to be much more intriguing than I might have thought at the outset. The parameters of the billboard make for unexpected experimentation with monumental scale, and its location allows for contextual relationships that are wholly different from a gallery setting.
In this second iteration of the series, one of Anne Collier’s recent developing tray images is blown up and left drifting in an expanse of wide, thick blackness. On the white walls of a gallery and at normal scale, this image (it’s the artist’s eye) would be much more intimate and personal, and the whole process centric theme of the emerging image floating in the tray would be more at the forefront of engaging with the work. But on this massive scale, and in the context of the bustling city around it, the work is transformed into a penetrating, disconcerting, Orwellian gaze. It’s as though she’s peering through the knothole of the tray out into our diorama world.
Collector’s POV: This commissioned work was not overtly for sale, nor are there many comparables in terms of scale in recent auction history. Collier is represented in New York by Anton Kern Gallery (here).
