10 GQ-Approved Artists You Should Know at Art Basel Miami: Graham Collins

Collins is best known for his hanging pieces using spray enamel and blocks of color, but at Basel he unveils a new set of sculptures inspired by stuff you'd expect to find in the aisles of CVS. Taking toothbrushes and potato chips and dipping them in bronze, he's taken everyday items and turned them into objects of desire. Contemporary art's supposed to reflect the times, but Collins taken it a step further with material time capsules emblematic of the way we live

Name: Graham Collins

** **Age: 34

Hometown: Washington D.C.

Gallery: Journal Gallery

What He’s Taking to Basel: "Sculptures and Paintings"

Tool of Choice: "Bronze, spray enamel"

Influencers: "Robert Gober, Jackson Pollock"

Can you tell us a bit about what you’ll be showing at Basel?

Welded metal sculptures and paintings that deal with materiality.

Do you prefer one medium over another?

I try to conceive projects that are going to give me mindless fabrication time. So the paintings work like that. All the decisions that go into making them are about craftsmanship. The ideas behind it are one thing, but I like working on them physically. It helps keep me sane.

I’ve read a little bit about your relationship to found objects?

For the sculptures I get things I find cast in bronze at a jeweler and then assemble them together. I look to find things that are interesting to me for whatever reason: either I encounter them all the time or they peak my interest. In all of them I figure out something that’s interesting that legitimizes a use for myself and then create a raw material out of it.

To me they’re fun, quirky, and hands-on, and I think there’s a link there to what they’re made out of. Like the toothbrushes, they encapsulate a certain moment in time. Shampoo is the same, Head and Shoulders had some really beautiful bos back in the day.

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What are you hoping to get out of Basel this year?

This year it’s really showing new work, in a funny way it can be a really good context for weirder stuff. People are really into bold and exciting. So while it’s an art fair, which is the worst context, it’s actually pretty amazing.

What’s important for you when someone is looking at your work?

I think about these things and I have a lot of my own ideas that inform why I make certain work or why work looks a certain way, but one of the things I always think about is to make work that anybody from any walk of life can understand on some level, who can appreciate it on some level, recognize it as art, and won’t be bummed out about that. I have a masters degree in art so I want to be able to talk to these people as well. I want to start with my mom and her friends [laughter].

Is there a level of comfort there?

There’s a comfort there, maybe there’s romanticism—a yearning for a form of universal communication. I feel like a lot of artists make it so hard to understand what they’re saying. I’ve made it my mission to make stuff that’s not dumbed down but still really easy to access.

And what can art communicate that other mediums can’t?

Art’s a place to communicate abstract thought. It does something language can’t. I think it’s a space that allows for a certain amount of freedom of expression. There are restrictions sometimes on what you can say, though.

And what are some of those past restrictions that you’ve faced in the art world?

I say that, but then I feel like there’s always a way around restrictions, there are ways of meeting the art world on good terms and finding a way to operate within it on good terms. And in the end, that’s what I have to do. I love art because it has this potential for freedom, but then on the flip side there are all these ideologies being projected at you from left and right.

Many people, particularly those who don’t know the art world that well, might think it’s empt from gender bos. Can you speak to that?

There’s a difference in numbers across the board, and a lot of times they’re in favor of men. You’d think that the art world would be an ideal place to have this conversation about gender, but it’s self-censoring; it self-polices it’s own discourse so heavily that people are afraid to say anything. People can say really thoughtful and useful things, but in the end they’ll be attacked.

With regard to your upbringing, were there any formative moments growing up that affected you as an artist?

I’m from DC, so since I was very young I was always around really great free museums. I went to college there, I was exposed to all kinds of stuff. The first artist I got really excited about was Jackson Pollock; that was a long time ago. My experience with that work has changed.

What artists have you looked up to?

Robert Gober...you don’t see one of his pieces from ten feet away and say_oh that chair is handmade and cast_; you see it as the kind of quasi-surreal, bizarre cultural assemblage that it is. You see it as a complete image. But then, of course, there’s a whole backstory; you might not know it right away, but it’s there. There’s context.

What are thoughts on the connection between art and fashion?

There’s a connection...and there’s no reason for it not to be healthy. There’s the money side of things, but then there’s the creative side, too. I think of a lot of the work of fashion photographers as art that I love.