World Edit
June 10 – July 16, 2022

Collin Leitch

Shoot the Lobster is pleased to announce World Edit, an exhibition of new sculpture and wall-based works by New York-based artist, Collin Leitch. Organized by Claudine Élysée.

I first turned to 3D printing as a way to generate broad, precise swaths of plastic that I could incorporate into larger sculptural assemblages. Most of the prints themselves are extrusions of two-dimensional shapes rather than figurines or scale models that would usually require a higher level of detail than a PLA extrusion printer is able to provide. Even in these pieces, the continuous slopes and CAD curves come up against the limit of printable resolution, resulting in significant areas of sequential, visible layers of deposited plastic. I have come to embrace this topography, as to me it is the material trace of how the 3D printer encodes information, like film grain, or the scan lines of analog video. It is still hard to imagine what the ubiquitous application of these printers will be in a few decades time. At that point, will the comparatively low resolution then become the fashion of tomorrow’s nostalgia, like the grain and those scan lines?

All the constituent prints of each piece are mounted on mahogany hardwood, a species which was at one point used for the exteriors of wood paneled cars. The wood has been shaped using a computer controlled milling system that functions similarly to the 3D printer–however, it is a subtractive process, while the 3D printer is an additive one. These processes resolve each other, like identically weighted values on opposite sides of an equal sign. I have taken to calling these pieces relief drawings, and treating the surface of the relief as a unified, comprehensive volume, whose contours bear a plausible relationship to those in the drawings’ source, as if, at the boundary of each piece, in whatever shape it may take, it has been edited, or cut out of the world.

– Collin Leitch

Collin Leitch (b. 1993) received a B.A. from Bard College in 2016. His films have screened at Channels Video Art Festival in Melbourne, Australia; LUBOV, NY; Mery Gates, NY; and Microscope Gallery, NY. Recent solo exhibitions include Camera Rider at Team Gallery in 2019. He has been in group exhibitions at As It Stands, LA, and King’s Leap, NY.

Installation photography by Stefany Lazar