NYAB Event - Graham Collins “Clean Room”

Graham Collins “Clean Room”

SOLOWAY

This event has ended.

The terms “clean room” and “clean room design”* are used as metaphors for the gallery space and art production. The paintings on view were designed completely from the ground up, utilizing research into traditions of art conservation, strategies of authorial distance, and fabrication methods. Each work is dated 2014 and signed by the artist, sometimes twice. The works incorporate marks made hundreds of years ago, marks made over the course of a century, and brand-new marks.

Clean Room is an experiment in stopping time. Equal weight is given to the lives of these paintings before, during, and after the exhibition. Clean Room is an archeology of imagined spaces based on real life. It is a celebration of the hired hand, the Sunday painter, the amateur inventor, the armchair philosopher of digital space, a schizophrenic forgery, histrionic minimalisms, the rusted-out muffler of the mid-Atlantic, the broken taillight of the Pacific coast, the dented fender of Western Europe.

The exhibition design follows a pragmatic approach. A heat-welded vinyl floor is installed throughout the gallery. There is a new, wall-sized oil painting of an old, wood-sided wall. Opposing this is an image of the same wall appearing as it may have the day it was built. This pairing is echoed in a set of shaped canvas works, some made from re-stretching old paintings, others from stretching canvas covered in archival inkjet. This installation will be rotated periodically over the course of the show.