Anne Collier
Galerie Neu
There are many good reasons to cry. Many bad, also. Love, laughter, fear, fury, disgust, relief, vacuity, loss. (“Loss is legion,” Gillian Rose writes.) Scant few human reactions denote such an abundance of emotion as the single tear shed.
But, given its ability to symbolize so universally, the tear in isolation frustrates. Cropped to close quarters, liquid on a stranger’s face, the lone tear lacks the contextualizing information required to determine its causality. “Tears are signs,” croons Roland Barthes in A Lover’s Discourse (1977), “not expressions.” Displaced from their flesh and blood,