EXHIBITION IMAGES | PRESS RELEASE | ARTIST PAGE
GRAHAM COLLINS – WORKERS PLAYTIME
HMGP | 60 Greenpoint Avenue, Brooklyn, NY
On view by appointment through December 9
Halsey McKay is thrilled to present Workers Playtime, Graham Collins’ fifth solo show with the gallery, on view November 2 through December 9 at HMGP, 60 Greenpoint Avenue, Brooklyn. The exhibition is a cacophonous gathering of ideas and influences on Collins multifaceted practice that combines a range of subject, material and compositional approaches to broadly reflect on the traps and conventions of western art history. The exhibition also includes works that Collins selected by David Armacost, Peyton Bradley, Terry Cole, faith****, Jeremy Jansen, Lucy Mink, Sayak Mitra, An Pham, Amos Poe, Pamela Sneed, Lizzie Wright, Megan Weeda.
“ I’m viewing this show as a conceptual clearinghouse of recent studio experiments, focusing on the relationship between creative labor, technology and politics.
My paintings in this show include reworkings of political cartoons by the actor and comedian Jim Carrey, painted in a homemade casein, acrylic and oil on hemp canvas over wooden panels. I’m also showing some extensions of previous bodies of work: geometric abstractions painted over contrasting, sewn-together surfaces; paintings on ceramic supports; paintings made using excess casein from my ceramic paintings, and paintings of No Parking signs associated with film productions in NYC.Many of the works are resolved by joining disparate elements into a singular form. There are also several ceramic sculptures based on 3D printers.
I’ve wanted to do my own show of reworked Jim Carrey cartoons since his 2018 show chronicling the first two years of the Trump Presidency, and have been working on this version off and on for the past three years, while juggling other responsibilities, jobs and art-making. There were specific goals when I started this project, namely to try to figure out what a “good painting” version of these images might entail. This seemed direct enough at the start but has felt increasingly elusive, like trying to precisely answer “how does art relate to politics”. At the same time the urgency to just do the show in some manner has grown. For months my mind would do this daily cycle where everything seemed to click and I would get excited about the show, then I would glance at twitter, or have to go to work, and have this sense of absolutely not wanting to show this stuff. That started to feel like a cop-out and I decided to just make this show happen and to show not just the Carrey paintings but kind of empty my studio into the gallery- a chaotic but honest presentation of my own creative work. I decided to also bring in some other peoples paintings. This is a group of artists whose work I look at and think about frequently, for one reason or another.”
– Graham Collins