COLLIER SCHORR
'8 Women'
303 Gallery, New York
27.02.2014 - 12.04.2014
303 Gallery is pleased to present “8 Women”, our tenth exhibition of the work of Collier Schorr. In “8 Women”, Schorr presents works spanning from the mid-nineties to the present. Schorr’s earliest works utilized appropriated ads from fashion magazines to address issues of authorship and desire. The works introduced a female gaze into the debate about female representation. Appropriation was Schorr’s first medium and in some sense she returns to it, taking her own commissioned fashion images and folding them into a dialogue with other works. Using the language of appropriation, found images are redefined as Schorr is in a sense “finding” and using her own images to explore new ways of relating the performer to the photographer. Far from the detachment of typical post-appropriation aesthetics, Schorr intimates subversion in the origins of her own photographs, suggesting that the texture of a circulated image carries a particular charge, both in its restaging and in its relation to other images.
The works in “8 Women” propose a variety of subjects, all of whom are involved in performance, be it as artists, models or musicians. Schorr, who has been working in fashion for the last 10 years, created sets that doubled as her studio, teasing out images that could only be made with a subject that could travel between the object of desire and the enforcer of an identity crafted in that very moment. Drawing inspiration from photo histories of female performance, film, and dance artists, Schorr began to work with models that seemed to strike a similar balance between display and authorship. Working between out-takes and manipulations of tear sheets, Schorr questions who the women that desire to be looked at are, as well as what power exists in acknowledging that as a post-feminist position.
Works from this exhibition will be featured in the upcoming catalogue, “8 Women,” published by Mack.
A future solo retrospective of Collier Schorr’s work is planned to take place at the Jewish Museum in New York. Recent exhibitions include “More American Photographs”, CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco; “History in Art”, Museum of Contemporary Art, Krakow; and “Better Than Before”, Le Consortium, Dijon. In 2010, her work was included in “Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She has also been included in the recent exhibitions at Ellipse Foundation, Cascais; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH; Los Angeles County Art Museum, Los Angeles, The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Hartware Medienkunstverein, Dortmund; and Kunstwerke Berlin, as well as publishing numerous books with Steidl/Mack. Collier Schorr lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
© 303 Gallery