Anne Collier - Woman crying

WOMAN CRYING, COMIC (FOR TEXTS TO ART) (2020) The crying woman is a recurring motif (not only) in art. It feeds the misogynistic fantasy of the so-called weaker sex, which is prone to hysteria and madness. In her series “Women Crying,” the artist Anne Collier, who was born in Los Angeles in 1970 and now lives in New York, explores this clichéd image of the woman in tears. To do this, she uses an analog camera to photograph existing depictions of crying women on vinyl covers, in newspapers and romance comic strips. She exclusively uses images from the Cold War era with their traditional gender roles and isolates certain details such as the areas of the eyes or individual tears. The specificity of this series is also impressive in its anniversary edition “Woman Crying, Comic (for texts on art)”: the focus on the detail of the watery and frightened eye surrounded by the thick lash line allows, on the one hand, the dot structure of the four-color printing technique that is characteristic of newspapers and comics to emerge . On the other hand, it frees the woman depicted from her patriarchal framing, thus decoupling her from the place intended for her in society.