Every project I’ve done has been an inquiry into what it is we look for in an artwork. — Allan McCollum
Since the late 1960s, Allan McCollum has developed a body of work that shifts attention from the isolated object to the collective conditions through which objects become recognizable, desirable, exchangeable, and memorable. His ensembles of image-less paintings, casts, drawings, and individualized forms examine how a culture can produce standardized objects while simultaneously sustaining the desire for certain objects to be regarded as singular. In McCollum’s work, repetition allows a broad investigation on institutions, habits of perception, systems of value, and the narratives through which individuals understand themselves.
This inquiry has unfolded over more than five decades, from early experiments in California to community-based collaborations and systems of forms conceived on a potentially planetary scale. Its coherence in a specific method: reduce a category of object to its most conventional signs, reproduce it serially, and observe the social and affective meanings that emerge from this operation.