The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2022 Visual Grant to Coleman Collins for his new project “Body Errata”. Coleman is interested in genetic research. He wants to know how the cumulative changes in our knowledge of the body and biological processes have produced our current reality: behaviors and diseases can be predicted, genes can be edited. As a descendant of slaves (with an uncertain genealogical tree), Collins also investigates how this technology can shed light on the past. The artist sequenced his DNA – receiving a long string of nucleotides (composed of the letters ACGT, as opposed to digital Ones and Zeros), while also discovering that he was 50% Nigerian, 30% Congolese, and 20% Northern European. Collins found artifacts from these cultures and 3D scanned them (gesturing to another, cultural type of inheritance), and took the 3D scans and began to manipulate them. He mutated the forms and produced new sculptures from these mutations, using 3D printing and CNC cutting. The show will also include new video works, drawings, digital prints, and laser cut metal objects.

So anyway, DNA contains four bases — adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine — and the sequences of those bases are what we call genes. Each unique sequence of bases directs the production of proteins, proteins that make up each of our bodies. 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 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’s 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.

For more information please visit Coleman’s website.