Collin Leitch

Aug 22

Written By Admin

INSIDERS

Collin Leitch combines his experience as a filmmaker with his love for “thing- ness” to make “entertainment centers,” a contemporary riff on a classic main- stay in American culture: the TV. Using a substantial collection of scanned film media, including negatives of photos and 16 mm and 35 mm film, Leitch amalgamates a diverse array of ana- log cinematic sources absent of fixed digital resolution to create video collages formatted for a 4K tilted screen. He doesn’t take resolution for granted; rather, resolution becomes the subject of his pieces. To house the videos, Leitch cre- ates hybrid reinterpretations of vintage TV monitor housing that recall the cumbersome teak credenzas of the mid-century and the thick plastic frames in the early 2000s. The results are dimensional, ambiguous compositions. The rough layer lines that identify the 3D-printed PLA plastic are akin to the analog video scan lines and pixels present in the videos, which the artist appreciates; the marks show the physical limit to how much information can be kept in each type of output.

As Leitch observes, “The whole history of television as furniture and video art is so entwined.”1 Indeed, before “video art” had a name (and when separate playback devices didn’t yet exist), video artists also called their works “television.” The design polemic found in the furniture/sculpture tension, there from video’s inception, remains a recurring theme in his work, as well as curious fodder in the art/design land- scape of today.

B. 1993, Mount Kisco, NY
Lives and works in Queens, NY

collinleitch.net
@collin.rn