In the 1960s, philosopher Marshall McLuhan came up with the idea of ‘hot and cool media’ to distinguish between culture which demands a quick, emotionally charged reaction and that which leaves space for slower, more considered responses. Anne Collier’s art is cool. Baltic, even. Much of her practice consists of large-format photographs showing objects saturated with pop-culture resonance (often the pop culture of a previous age), placed in expanses of white space. The items allude to the carnivalesque world of hot media, but the clinical framing obliges us to step back and think about how they might be intended to act on our thoughts and feelings.

The crux of Collier’s Modern Institute show is in the connections established between three figures of varying fame whose lives evoke the fate of women under 20th-century capitalism. There are photographs of LPs containing recordings of Sylvia Plath reading her poetry (‘Sylvia Plath’) and Marilyn Monroe singing songs and performing scenes from her films (‘Album [Marilyn Monroe]’). There is also a pile of books by the radical feminist Valerie Solanas (‘Valerie’), best-known for shooting Andy Warhol in 1968. Whereas Plath and Monroe succumbed to suicide, Solanas proposed a more radical solution to the pressures brought to bear by patriarchy, and in her 1967 SCUM Manifesto she called for the eradication of the male sex.

At a distance of more than half a century, and in the contemplative space invited by Collier’s bare staging, we’re invited to scrutinise how pop culture and misogyny, encoded in the objects by which the public ‘got to know’ these women, might have acted on and eroded their lives. Accompanying works, including several fixating on the human eye, suggest how we mistake reproduction for emotional reality. Not a thrilling show (and not intended to be) but a quietly engaging one.

Anne Collier, The Modern Institute, Glasgow, until Wednesday 21 May.