from The Shapes Project,

2005–present

At once astute and irreverent, Allan McCollum’s work ironizes the systems of production and reproduction that dominate life in the twenty-first century. The 144 digital prints seen here, displayed like items in a supermarket, comprise a small portion of McCol­lum’s massive <em>The Shapes Project</em>. An exercise in absurdity, <em>The Shapes Project</em> will result in as many shapes as there will be people in the middle of the twenty-first century. Using Adobe Illustrator, the artist has thus far created 214,000,000 shapes, each one unique; the production of some shapes he has outsourced to other individuals. In addition to monoprints, sculptures, and wall reliefs, they have been translated into non-art formats, including gifts, awards, emblems, toys, and souvenirs. McCollum first rose to prominence in the late 1970s as a member of the Pictures Generation, a diverse group of artists who questioned notions of rarity, authorship, and originality, the criteria against which value in the art world is determined.