Coleman Collins’s DNA is a Material in Sculptures about Inheritance – RisePEI

Recently, Coleman Collins has been chopping, marking, and changing his DNA sequence into movies, sculptures, and prints. Utilizing iterative processes, he checks the boundaries of his supplies, producing errors, variations, and gaps that probe the idea of inheritance. These experiments are on view on the new location of the gallery Temporary Histories as a part of “Physique Errata,” the artist’s first solo present in New York.

In some works, genetics are a place to begin for contemplating what else is likely to be inherited, from household narratives to generational trauma. In a sequence of works fabricated from plywood panels completed to appear to be stone, Collins used a CNC machine to chop out completely different compositions that incorporate the letters A, C, G, and T–the nucleotides that make up DNA. In Tetrad (all works 2022), these comparatively abstracted letters label completely different planes of a geometrical determine positioned above a extra narrative textual content: 04-010/XMFM WAS BORN A SLAVE IN NORTH CAROLINA. HE NEVER LEARNED TO READ, BUT WAS EXTRAORDINARILY GOOD WITH ARITHMETIC AND GEOMETRY. Totally different sorts of knowledge meet and alter type: whereas the textual content is impressed by Collins household lore, its topic is referred to by a genealogical numbering system. The geometric determine makes an attempt to reconcile these two strands of knowledge visually; nonetheless, the precise connections stay elusive. What sorts of knowledge can DNA testing restore? How do they work together with our long-held beliefs and defining private narratives?

In one other piece on this sequence, Sequential Shift, the artist juxtaposes a bit of his DNA sequence with partial renderings of an Ife head, an icon of West African tradition and artistry. A number of the heads are set off in tetrahedrons, a form Collins refers to as a great type. Right here, the CNC machine interpreted the artist’s digital recordsdata with various ease, and the outcomes produce a blended temporal register: whereas the sharp strains of the tetrahedrons are managed and actual, repetitive speckles give the heads a pixelated look and clusters of markings round a number of of the top fragments give the floor the looks of getting been worn down over time. On this collapsed aircraft, Collins appears to position himself inside a creative lineage.

In a single nook of the gallery, an set up titled Would be the final time, I don’t know references the paradox of the “Grandfather’s Axe.” Is a household heirloom nonetheless “genuine” if all of its components have been changed over time? This thought puzzle is often used to ponder the id of a single entity. Nonetheless, it can be used to suppose by means of the connection between a descendant and an ancestor and the way a lot genetic materials they really share. On the gallery, six indistinguishable axe heads are every laser engraved with the phrase this can be the final time, suggesting an unsure however ongoing length. They’re organized on high of an MDF board on the ground; two flat squares of metal in reverse corners barely elevate two pairs of the objects. The work performs with each bodily and philosophical dimensions of the paradox: confronted with an identical objects, a viewer can not distinguish an authentic from its copies. The axes’ placement in a largely symmetrical sample and in pairs suggests an effort to guage similarities and variations. Divorced from their handles, axe heads are much less useful than symbolic, lending the work a cool and contemplative tone.

In one other nook of the gallery, two stacked screens show alternating video works. In Dispersion, the underside monitor performs a brief dwelling film of a ship journey Collins took in Nigeria in 2017: starting outdoors the coastal city of Badagry, close to the border with Benin, he traces a former slave route that results in the “Door of No Return,” a port the place many enslaved individuals final set foot in Africa. Within the high monitor, the identical video slowly degrades with every repetition, breaking down into pixels and first colours, rising extra summary every time. Its disintegration (which Collins achieved by exporting the video time and again) each parallels the artist’s deteriorating reminiscence of the journey and invokes the violent erasure of Black individuals’s origins by means of the transatlantic slave commerce. Whereas DNA testing may pinpoint details about one’s ancestry, this work, like Tetrad, insists {that a} return to 1’s origins is at all times incomplete and alludes to the diffuse results of generational trauma.

Within the middle of the gallery, Information self-portrait 2 ties collectively all of Collins’s iterative processes. A pc motherboard engraved with the artist’s gene sequence, the work is probably the most direct instantiation of the artist’s DNA (the precise code wanted to provide one other Coleman Collins), but additionally it is the least guided by his interpretation. In its starkness, the work brings out an existential dimension to the present: “What does it imply to have a physique, and particularly this one?” the artist requested when talking in regards to the exhibition. “Physique Errata” presents some hypotheses, discovering new kinds on the breaking factors of knowledge, narratives, and supplies.