Collier’s selected artefacts in some way attempt to define the women behind them, and, in turn, her photographing of them speaks to their significance to her own life and thinking. They are linked by a repackaging of female identity and image. May/Jun 2009 (Cindy Sherman, Mark Seliger), 2009, plays with this process itself, centring the trappings of celebrity ‘cool’ and self-presentation – not looking at the camera, smoking, wearing black. Sherman has consistently interrogated and played with female archetypes in culture, ever since producing her Untitled Film Stills, 1977–80, a series of self-portraits which adopted the aesthetics of 20th-century film. This work elaborates on and complicates Sherman’s oeuvre to critique the cultivation of fame and gender stereotypes within the mass media. The piece underlines the dual strands at play in the exhibition, both the process of identifying with images and creating identities in images.
The Modern Institute
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