Collier Schorr “8 Women”
February 27th – April 12th, 2014
303 Gallery, New York City
303 Gallery will present “8 Women”, their tenth exhibition of the work of Collier Schorr, beginning on February 27th. 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.
303 Gallery is open Tuesday-Saturday from 10 am – 6 pm. For further information please visit 303gallery.com
