Coleman Collins The Upper Room

January 17 – March 1, 2025.

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Brief Histories is pleased to present The Upper Room, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Coleman Collins. Featuring new reliefs, prints, and video works, the exhibition represents a continuation of Collins’ formal and theoretical engagement with the ways that real and virtual spaces are socially produced.

Coleman Collins is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and researcher. Recent exhibitions and screenings have taken place at e-flux, New York; Ehrlich Steinberg, Los Angeles; Herald Street, London; Soldes, Los Angeles; the Palestine Festival of Literature, Jerusalem/Ramallah; Larder, Los Angeles; Hesse Flatow, New York; Brief Histories, New York; Carré d’Art, Nîmes; and the Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna. His work is in the permanent collection of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Collins is a 2022 recipient of a Graham Foundation research grant. He has also received support from NYFA and Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation. 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 is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of California, Irvine. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

Coleman Collins, The upper room, 2025. UHD video, 16:9, stereo sound, 20 min.

The first section of the exhibition highlights a new series of subtractive low-relief wall works. The relief works—derived from the artist’s drawings of architectural sites in Liberia—are part of an ongoing, iterative series of formal experiments in spatial representation. Interior scenes are mechanically cut from single blocks of engineered wood, with visual spatial fields created solely via subtle gradations of depth in the carved material. Inset within these interiors are images reproduced from the artist’s archival research.

In the back section of the gallery, a newly created video work (eponymously titled The upper room) traces the often destructive effects of mimetic desire through a narrative video essay, presenting both fact and speculative fiction. Drawing parallels between diasporic fantasies of return, gospel music, and 19th-century projects of nation-state building, The Upper Room casts an eye on other types of spatial production—both real and imaginary.

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.

(Spring 2022)

*Sequential Shift*, 2022. CNC-carved MDF, 39 x 26 inches

*May be the last time, I don’t know*, 2022. Six laser engraved axe heads, steel, MDF.

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.

*Dispersion*, 2022. 2-channel HD video, 5:00 min.

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.

Coleman Collins, *Body Errata*, April 1 - May 21, 2022. Brief Histories, New York. (Installation view).

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.

*Error (The arrest of the spirit)*, 2022. Archival pigment print, Sapele mahogany frame.

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.