Coleman Collins
Body Errata

April 1 – June 11, 2022 • Brief Histories • New York City

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The letters A, C, G, and T appear in numerous places throughout Body Errata, a direct reference to the artist’s personal DNA sequence. Each unique sequence of bases directs the production of proteins, proteins that make up each of our bodies (mine, yours). Our bodies contain code that is passed down through generations of captivity, migration, and traumatic events. The process of copying and recopying is long, slow, and inexact – there are always errors. Pixelated images, corrupted files, repetition with the occasional jarring difference. Cut and paste. Chop and screw. The process of inheritance is always in flux. As its constituent parts are eroded, broken off, replaced, the true nature of the thing itself comes into question.

The ax’s handle and head have been changed out many times over the years. Every plank in the ship has been switched out for another. We don’t need to view this lack of fidelity – between original and copy, ancestor and descendant – as a lack of authenticity. It might represent an opportunity; at the very least it’s anti-deterministic.

So the work is mostly considering information changing forms, the relationship between data and form, material that becomes immaterial and vice versa. Cultural and material inheritance. Like this process that happens over many generations that eventually creates mutations, gaps, décalages. How the noise in the signal produces new systems; how the nature of a thing is not consistent through time, but actually full of these mistakes or inconsistencies, and through these inconsistencies we find a certain kind of generativity.

Exhibited at Brief Histories, Body Errata deals with data and the manifestation of form through time, and reflects on our contemporary condition and the interrelationships between nature, people, and technology. The exhibition is an interconnection of video, sculpture, prints, and computer aided wood carving, displaying experimentation with RNA/DNA sequencing, and 3D scanning.

Coleman Collins is an interdisciplinary artist and writer who explores the ways that small, iterative processes can have outsized effects over time. His work often identifies technological developments and relationships of debt and obligation as the modes through which these processes are enacted. Recent exhibitions and screenings include Carré d’Art, Nîmes; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Nothing Special, Los Angeles; Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York; ltd los angeles, Los Angeles; Artspace, New Haven, and Human Resources Los Angeles. Collins was a 2021 recipient of a NYFA Artists Corps Grant. He received an MFA from UCLA in 2018, and was a 2017 resident at the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture. In 2019, he participated in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program. He lives in New York, where he is currently serving as the inaugural Artist-in-Residence at Stony Brook University’s Future Histories Studio. 

Previously, Collins and Brief Histories collaborated on the publication Tame the Wilderness? (Brief Histories Press, 2020), as well as a staging of the artist’s performance GuiltCoin in 2021. Body Errata is presented with support from the Café Royal Cultural Foundation. 

Exhibition Reviews:

Reflections on Coleman Collins’s ‘Body Errata’ at Brief Histories, New York: Coleman Collins in conversation with Erik DeLuca, published in Third Text, July 16, 2022.

Not Your Grandfather’s Axe: Coleman Collins At Brief Histories
by May Makki, published in Art in America, June 10, 2022.