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OVERVIEW | CV | PRESS | GALLERY EXHIBITIONS

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Halsey McKay Gallery presents a suite of new Graham Collins works constructed from remnants of found paintings.

This project is accompanied with texts by Alex Allenchey and R.H. Lossin.

This viewing room is now closed. For inquires on available works but Graham Collins, please contact info@halseymckay.com.

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R.H. Lossin on Graham Collins

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The topography of the sewn paintings is complex. Many minds made the many decisions that are applied to the pieces of canvas used in these works. By virtue of their origins in completely different paintings, the components vary in age and weight. They are variously cracked, smooth, saturated, and lacking pigment altogether. The bits of multicolored canvas are thoughtfully recomposed according to artificial schemes (parts of sky arranged by date for example).  Sewn together by Collins and re-stretched, the new canvases have both an intellectual and a visual coherence. From a distance they appear as paintings rather than composites. What is being registered is not a document of process. The pieces are finished; they are not about being made. But this material, like any material, has limits and so the surface dips and buckles, furrows are formed by hidden seams and the threads are strained by the stretching exposing an occasional suture. 

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In other words, the work shows itself. Or, given the context here—the weight that accumulates on the word “work” when it abuts the word “art”—we should say that the construction is apparent.  And this construction shows itself to be boring, uninspired, repetitive.  Manufactured in the sense that it was made (facere) by a hand (manus). This is important not because it is so incredible to see an artist do “real work,” whatever that may mean (even if there is a significant, material difference aesthetically encoded in work made in this fashion rather than fabricated elsewhere through an industrial process). The fact that Collins works shouldn’t surprise us and isn’t all that interesting. Small shops, artisans, local and hand-made objects: these are consumer fetishes not visual systems and certainly not politics. And there is nothing objectively more desirable or less exploitative in small scales. 

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There is something though, in these slight gaps and depressions, only visible to a careful and (literally) close observer; in these traces of craftsmanship that would have been lost in a more perfectly seamless product. This residue of construction shifts our attention from a mode of production that reifies artistic genius—internal, individual, intellectual—to one that prioritizes anonymous skill. We are reminded, simultaneously, of the sewn paintings’ origins in many other paintings and reminded of the elaborate cultural system that distinguishes art from other systems of production and artists from other types of workers. Additionally, we are reminded of the social relationships of inclusion and exclusion that separate artists from other types of painters. Several of the paintings resemble other forms, or point to other fields of aesthetic production. “The Dollar Menu of the Soul” and “Perfect Map” recall color palettes and interior design, and nearly all of them suggest the decorative through a glancing resemblance to mosaics. 

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In these ways, the paintings index their origins as a form of creative output that is not art, but rather craft or hobby. The original paintings, we assume rightly or wrongly, are the products of diversion not vocation. Paintings that are discarded—that move from a private space directly into a second-hand market to be purchased as scrap materials—do not enter into the circuits of exchange, evaluation, contemplation, and sale that make something art in a market system. The original paintings are an accumulation and application of manual skills and methods but presumably lack the creative, intellectual, process that is, in a culture still very much operating with an Enlightenment belief in the uniqueness of contemplative pleasure, worth paying extra money for. And herein lies the quiet brilliance of these pieces, the critique embedded in the repetition and mundane construction: the originals—that fetish of collectors, that thing with an “aura”—are mere, mundane materials and the final product a matter of Pantone-like schematics and a sewing machine. 

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Authorship is sketchy. The dates are often ranges that mark the creation of the parts not the whole. Abstract painting has in common with economic markets a lack of referents. The absence of representation obscures abstraction’s relationship to the world in a manner similar to a market’s denial of the social relations and material conditions of production. Here, we have abstract images that are durational, social, collective and about their materials as much as anything else. They are also–and not coincidentally–works that call into question any number of related and overlapping dichotomies (production/consumption; art/craft; masculine/feminine etc.) that continue to structure visual culture despite all the critical efforts made by decades of self-referential artwork.

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This series is the third iteration of a larger project that began with the transformation of sections of found paintings into shaped canvases. These particular sewn paintings are made from scraps of scraps. Several things about this are appealing. There is a ‘waste-not’ component that opens a conversation about the relationship between aesthetic pleasure, disposability, and production more broadly. And then there is the simple fact that this progression from shaped canvases, to large sewn painting, to pieces constructed from the leftovers of these leftovers contains a sense of finality—of having materially exhausted all the possibilities for this project. But it also strikes me as tender. Collins bought paintings that he found compelling. This is not a project of recontextualization—an additive gesture that gives something insignificant new significance. And this total use seems to me to be an act of care that reflects this respect for the work. A demonstration that every portion of the original canvas, every decision made by the original artist, needs to be preserved and displayed and carefully attended to by maker and consumer alike.

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There is nothing that an individual artist can do about a system that discards the efforts of some and inflates the values of others. And direct comment on the situation risks false modesty that is itself inflationary, or worse, the performance of a dominant class position through “discovery” of unappreciated artifacts. What Collins has done is quite wonderful given these challenges: he’s made abstract painting itself talk about the social relations of production.  

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Talking about art under capitalism requires a suspension of disbelief or a willfully naïve acceptance of the terms offered by big “A” Art’s claims of exceptionalism. Regardless of its style or intention, art is a luxury commodity. Its terms are, perhaps, less instrumental and there is, in its pointlessness, a sort of freedom from market pressure. Being outside of a cash transaction is one of the reasons why the philosopher Theodor Adorno believed certain artforms to contain revolutionary political potential. But even if we buy this idea that there are these outsides inside of capitalism, we are left to contend with the knowledge that the very exceptions—the “for art’s sake” of it—are themselves a function of bourgeois capitalism. The very notion of a non-transactional space of aesthetic freedom is, in fact, one of capitalism’s central legitimizing myths. This mode of production the artist in his studio, the writer at a distance from bourgeois society, the “independence” necessary for critique, is as historical a condition as any other. And it is disastrous for those outside of it because, no matter what the content, the mere existence of an autonomous field of art legitimizes the existence of a dominant class. This is a depressing dead end. Denying this seems terribly irresponsible but accepting it would spell the actual death of painting. 

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The suspension of disbelief or a willing embrace of cognitive dissonance offers a possible third way. Momentarily ignoring without denying these conditions is a worthy creative act in itself: a moment of actual autonomy for the spectator generated by the sincere and complex critique offered by the artist. In the space opened up by work like the sewn paintings—work that asks us to look carefully, slowly, at an object that has preserved and honored the work of others—we can imagine art doing something other than moving money around. We can see art’s social function in this model—literal perhaps—for a different way to produce and sustain our social fabric.

– R.H. Lossin

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Alex Allenchey on Graham Collins

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With this selection of small sewn canvases whose component little bits have been aggregated from hundreds of found paintings — Graham Collins imposes his artistic vision almost as a conductor would, orchestrating arrangements of visual notes through assorted associations that lead to intricately harmonized compositions. While Collins’ previous sewn-canvas works have occasionally operated on a grander scale — massive sprawling assemblages of large fabric swatches, whose abutting shapes and sudden juxtapositions call to mind epic narratives across sprawling landscapes — here the stories are tighter and more compact. Simpler, but no less complex.

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By eschewing a more traditional oil or acrylic authorship — the studied hand applying pigment to canvas — the presence of the artist is felt not through an intense study of the surface, but rather from an appreciation of the frameworks of construction. Scraps of canvas are sorted in some cases by color; in others, segments of sky from inherited paintings are meticulously stitched together in the chronological order in which they were acquired. The two shaped canvases, whose forms echo Collins’ bronze sculptures, operate almost in reverse — paring away any surrounding context rather than accumulating hints of shared origins. One pop-cultural parallel for the series is the classic cut-and-pasted ransom note: collaged pieces from intentionally untraceable sources that combine to create a distinct and compelling message.

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There is a quiet delight in these abstractions, a hum from the compressed collision of disparate voices. One’s eye races along awkward diagonals, drawing circuitous paths around rhomboids, daring to imagine what scenes these curious puzzle pieces once depicted. But what they once were doesn’t matter now, of course. They’ve been revivified and muscled into reconstituted forms by Collins, partnering to comprise newly possible presents and futures.

— Alex Allenchey

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Graham Collins was born Washington, D.C. in 1980. Collins received his BFA from Corcoran College of Art in Washington and his MFA from Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Recent solo exhibitions have been with Halsey McKay Gallery, New York, East Hampton, NY; Jacob Bjorn, Aarhus, DK; The Journal, Brooklyn, NY;  Soloway, Brooklyn, NY; Almine Rech, Brussels, BE; Bugada & Cargnel, Paris, FR; Jonathan Viner Gallery, London, UK. His work has been featured in several group exhibitions including at 1969, New York, NY; Mitchell Innes and Nash, New York, NY; Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA; Cooper Cole, Toronto, CA; Rachel Uffner, New York, NY; Bjorn and Gundorph, Aarhus, DK; Derek Eller, New York, NY; C. Grimaldis, Baltimore, MD; Marlborough Contemporary, New York,NY and Venus over Manhattan, New York, NY, among others. Collins currently lives and works in New York.