Collier Schorr

8 Women presents work which spans from the mid-nineties to the present. Schorr’s earliest works utilised appropriated adverts 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.

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. 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.… (meer)

At the age of four, Collier Schorr accompanied her father, an automotive photographer and journalist, to a local racetrack, where she watched the charismatic and youthful drag racer Charlie "Astoria Chas" Snyder at work on his dream race car, a 67 "Ko-Motion" Corvette. An article followed, with the now-eerie headline, "While Astoria Chas is doing his thing in Vietnam his friends are racing his L-88." For by the time the article was published, Charlie Snyder had gone to Vietnam, and after only one month of duty, died there on August 27, 1968, shortly after his twenty-first birthday. Astoria Chas never got the chance to drive his car as he had intended, and so his friends drag-raced it, setting the AHRA record for its class.
There I Was marks both a shift in medium and a conceptual departure for Collier Schorr. Beginning with her father's images of Snyder at work and Snyder's own snapshots from Vietnam, Schorr then draws on professional reportage pictures to literally sketch out Snyder's monumental journey from Queens to Vietnam and back. These drawings are contrasted with reproductions of vintage car-magazine articles and Schorr's own photographs and portraits. Based entirely on photography, this volume engages with the medium and simultaneously challenges the role of the photograph as document of the past. There I Was is a multifaceted look at escape, culture, dreams and mortality, conjuring an expressionistic portrait of the dichotomies of the late 1960s in a fractured wartime America.… (meer)