Daily Practice
CJ Collins
81 Leonard Gallery Windows,
On view from February 8th through March 22nd, 2022
81 Leonard Gallery is pleased to present the work of local Tribeca artist CJ Collins in PAUSE: Daily Practice, on view in the gallery’s street-facing windows from February 8th through March 22nd, 2022. Accompanied by an online showing of 10 additional paintings made over the course of the last year, PAUSE: Daily Practice presents a mere snapshot of the artist’s ritualistic, habitual mode of artmaking.
The word practice suggests an artist constantly at work, studying and learning through creating. Beyond the creative context, practice suggests ritual behavior, aimed at improving the mind, body, or soul. CJ Collins’ work embodies practice in all its essence, serving both the physical and spiritual demands of an obsession with energy and movement. There is no such thing as stillness in Collins’ work, as there is hardly stillness in life. When the world seemingly shut down; it kept turning nonetheless, and Collins kept creating the same, if not more fervently. Collins’ collection of work, like a well-worn journal, contains moments of calm, chaos, and everything in between, all captured with energetic gesture that resists stagnancy. Working in this mode, Collins achieves a dynamism in both abstraction and representation alike. Displayed in the gallery windows, Center Yourself and Summer Sight illustrate this duality, foiling an abstracted landscape scene with a moment of pure abstract exploration.
While Collins’ compositions capture the energy of the present moment, they find their origins in past marks made over years of daily sketching. Starting with drawings printed on sheets of clear plastic film, the artist layers and positions the transparencies, using an overhead projector to create new compositions from familiar marks. This process merges layers of information into one flat image, removing all evidence of which mark came first and compressing years of creative processing into a single moment of perception. Like the way memories shape our current understandings and impressions, Collins’ practice carries history, personality, and maturity.
2015 Summertime Sail, actually painted in August of 2021, recalls a memory of a distant time and place unbeknownst to the viewer but clearly poignant in the artist’s mind. Though more lyrical than literal, many of Collins’ titles offer subtle suggestions of her surroundings or feelings while making the work. Other titles, including Black #2, Black #3, and Black #5 hint at the repetitive nature of Collins’ process and her relentless desire to discover something. Her limited color palette functions to this end, honing in on the energy and emotions that arise from line and form without the aid of color.
CJ Collins was born in Texas and studied at the University of Texas in Austin. She received her MFA from the Santa Barbara Institute in 1975 before moving to New York in 1977, where she established her studio and place of residence in a TriBeCa warehouse. For more than 40 years, Collins has been working from this warehouse and has exhibited in solo and group shows across New York as well as in Chicago, Japan, and Dubai.
Works by CJ Collins are available for purchase. Please email to inquire, or view on Artsy.
