Pawel Althamer   & Artur Żmijewski James Lee Byars Sophie Calle   & Fabio Balducci Center for Tactical Magic Peter Coffin Jennifer Cohen Anne Collier Christian Cummings Trisha Donnelly Douglas Gordon Brion Gysin Friedrich Jürgenson Joachim Koester Jim Lambie Miranda Lichtenstein Euan Macdonald Jonathan Monk Senga Nengudi Paul Pfeiffer Eva Rothschild Mungo Thomson All Artists Anne Collier Untitled Aura Photograph (Tomma Abts), 2002 ANNE COLLIER (b. 1970 Los Angeles, CA) lives and works in New York. She was included in both Greater New York at P.S.1/MoMA (2005) and the 2006 Whitney Biennial. Collier has had solo exhibitions with Jack Hanley in San Francisco, Mark Foxx in Los Angeles and Corvi-Mora in London, and will be showing at Presentation House, Vancouver next year. Untitled (Aura Photographs) These images were produced during a very specific period between 2002 and 2004. They are portraits of artist-friends who were, for the most part, visiting the Bay Area in Northern California – where I was living at the time. Aura Photographs are photographic images taken with a modified Polaroid camera that its ‘creators’ claim can record the sitter’s spiritual energy (or ‘aura’.) Aura Photographic equipment is sold to New Age and Spiritualist stores with the promise that it represents an “exceptional business opportunity for the New Age.” All of the photographs were taken at a downtown Oakland psychic store. Each photographic session cost $15. The sitter was positioned directly in front of the camera with their hands resting on metal ‘sensors’ that were connected to both the camera and a nearby computer. Each image is accompanied by a multi-page computer printout that purports to ‘explain’ the chromatic effects visible in each image. Aura Photography claims for itself an ability to record and depict that which remains beyond perception: i.e. human spiritual energy. Outside of their obvious relationship to ‘New Age’ spirituality (a tendency commonly associated with the West Coast,) the images also make a sideways reference to the nineteenth century attempts to record - through photography - the paranormal. As with Victorian images that claimed to depict psychic occurrences - such as the appearance of spirits or ghosts - Aura Photography is a quasi-science: it makes specific claims for the photographic image that cannot be objectively justified. I am not the only artist to have been intrigued by aura photography. (Both Peter Coffin and Sylvie Fleury’s independent ‘aura’ works come immediately to mind.) In Aura Photography an image is simultaneously created and assessed. The ‘aesthetic’ properties of each image are of little interest to advocates of Aura Photography - outside of what the image supposedly ‘reveals’ about its subject. Yet the curious coloration and abstract pictorial effects are, in- and-of themselves, clearly worthy of further consideration. - Anne Collier, New York, 2006.