Artist on Artist // Photographer Annie Collinge on Surrealist Nancy Fouts

All photos courtesy Annie CollingeFirstly, let's please take a moment to welcome our fabulous new writer to the 3rd Ward crew, Perrin Drumm. As you can see from her site, this is a woman with a resumé after our own heart. So with that, we bring you one of Drumm's first pieces:

Annie Collinge is a London-born, Brooklyn-based photographer whose work I fell head over heels in love with when discovering it last year via It's Nice That. If you visit Collinge's site you'll see one of the photos I was struck by--one that now hangs over my dining table and is actually far more vivid in person.

As it turned out, Annie and I were practically neighbors. In fact, she delivered the photo to me herself, arriving soaking wet after trekking through the rain from Williamsburg to Greenpoint. When she appeared on my doorstep, dripping and cold but smiling bright, I was convinced that this was a gifted, committed artist.

Recently, Annie emailed to tell me about her latest project: A Selby-esque photo tour through the home of surrealist Nancy Fouts. The images were so intriguing I required some backstory.

"I basically went to Nancy's house and photographed her, her art and her strange collections of things," Collinge told me. "She lives in an old vicarage in Camden Town, which is beautifully preserved and full of completely amazing artifacts.

"My friend, Sam Huntley, was making a little film about her work.  When he first went to her house he knew I would love it and suggested I come over and meet her--and as soon as I saw it knew it was right up my street. She has made and collected all these amazing things. She used to work making models for advertising. The giant scissors in the hall are from an old Silk Cut advert in the 1980's."

Though Collinge doesn't typically work this way, documenting other people's belongings, she noted that "the project fits into my usual work as I always seems to be drawn to people's relationship to objects."

Fouts' work is nothing if not object-oriented, though it's still difficult to describe. To paraphrase It's Nice That's acute take: "The work of Nancy Fouts smells like popcorn in a pool hall, sounds like the beating of butterfly wings and looks like something you might find in a wizard’s medicine cupboard. This brilliant artist can flip your expectations on their heads with her lookbook of visual puns both lovely and bizarre. A self proclaimed object hoarder, Fouts follows in the surrealist tradition of marrying unrelated items to turn the everyday into the uncanny. But it’s her knack for clean presentation which really helps these images pack a punch. Are we laughing? Are we cringing? Do we care?"

Meanwhile, take a moment to double-take on these:

See more images from this project on Annie's website and we highly recommend following her cheeky (and brilliant) blog.

-- Perrin Drumm