Saturday, September 6, 2025 at 5:00 PM to Saturday, November 1, 2025 at 5:00 PM
Ehrlich Steinberg, Los Angeles
Ehrlich Steinberg is pleased to present Latent Space, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles–based artist Coleman Collins. Featuring a new video installation and large-scale wall reliefs, the exhibition extends Collins’s investigations into technological mediation, the relationship between physical and immaterial space, and the politics of linguistic and digital translation. The exhibition takes its title from the concept of “latent space,” a term in machine learning that describes the compressed field in which data (images, text, or sounds) is reduced to essential features and remapped according to underlying patterns and relationships. For Collins, latency signifies both the unseen and the deferred, a condition concealed within the psychological, technological, and historical. In the back gallery, a video installation narrates the end of a relationship through a pseudo-Platonic dialogue. The work incorporates nine wooden seating cubes modeled on the Wechsler Block Design test, a diagnostic tool for measuring spatial reasoning. The video’s conversation covers ideas of intelligence testing, from workplace personality assessments to CAPTCHAs and Turing Tests, before dissolving into a dreamlike passage through a 3D-modeled architectural space. In the front gallery, Collins presents a series of large-scale wall reliefs based on scans of the nineteenth-century Kingsley Plantation slave cabins in Jacksonville, Florida, the state’s oldest surviving plantation complex. Mechanically carved from engineered wood, these works transpose the digital ruins of the video’s dream sequence into physical form, their surfaces inlaid with AI-generated replicas of anthropological and colonial archive photographs. Latent Space examines the circumstances under which various forms of human and artificial “intelligence” are defined, measured, and valued. The exhibition situates the language of machine learning within a longer genealogy of copying, doubling, and categorization, extending from Plato’s theory of forms to contemporary AI, while grounding it in the ongoing afterlives of slavery and colonial modernity. - Coleman Collins (b. 1986, Princeton, NJ) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Collins received his MFA from UCLA, Los Angeles in 2018 and was a 2017 resident at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Madison, ME. He participated in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program in 2019. Previous exhibitions and screenings have taken place at Brief Histories, New York, NY (2025); Ehrlich Steinberg, Los Angeles, CA (2024); Herald St, London, UK (2024); e-flux, New York, NY (2024); Soldes, Los Angeles, CA (2023); Carré d’Art, Nîmes, FR (2022); Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, AT (2021); Nothing Special, Los Angeles, CA (2020); Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York, NY (2019); and Human Resources, Los Angeles, CA (2018). His work is in the permanent collection of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Collins is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow and has received support from the Graham Foundation, NYFA and Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation. He is currently Assistant Professor at University of California, Irvine.