8 Women

Collier Schorr’s latest book 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.