From Me to You
Gabriel Collins

Jun 13 – Jun 27, 2025
KOIK Contemporary
Mexico City, Mexico

The six works that Gabriel Collins (Los Angeles, 1994) presents at KOIK Contemporary offer a reflection on some of the prevailing systems of commodity exchange and communication. Here, understanding and comprehension are, for now, beyond our reach; deafness and the unwillingness to speak and listen are not elements up for debate. What’s at stake is neither content nor message, but rather the medium itself: paper, boxes, bubble wrap, supply methods, and distribution companies — in short, a game of nesting dolls or Chinese boxes that contain, limit, divert, and distance encounters between people.

The packaging used in each shipment both wraps and protects personal objects, merchandise, or treasured goods, while at the same time neutralizing and suspending their singularity and authenticity in exchange for increasing their manipulability and practicality within the capitalist organization of production. What at one moment might appear as an extremely fragile clay vessel, for example, through careful packaging can be transported from a truck to a trailer, to a crane, to a transatlantic container, and so on. Access to these transportation and messaging mechanisms tends to overflow the boundaries of necessary exchange and trivialize reciprocal correspondence in favor of a unilateral offering — a hallmark of the monopolistic monologue of commercial giants. Let’s just recall how, a few years ago, in the midst of the Covid crisis, paper intended for writing and publishing books became scarce because Amazon had stockpiled large quantities of paper pulp for the production of its cardboard packaging.

In this context, cardboard refers not only to shipping materials but also serves as the support for two works: Handle with Care I & II, which — inspired by geometric logic, right angles, the use of horizontal and vertical lines with primary colors, and the abstract order of Mondrian — recover the oppression of a rationalized lifestyle and economy, against which the white circles strive to survive. These circles, arranged vertically in the work What Am I Protecting?, are trapped under different layers of bubbles — both protective and suppressive.

Behind each shipment lurks the specter of a future in which even human bodies might be packed and shipped, transported in styrofoam boxes by systems far more efficient than today’s outdated, cumbersome, and costly airports — much like how, in daily practice, undocumented migrants cross borders hidden inside functional suitcases and containers.

“Did you get my message?” encapsulates, through a simple, everyday question, the thematic core of this body of work: the sender’s attempt to establish, interrupt, re-establish, prolong, and — above all — confirm that the channel of communication remains open. The overabundance of exchange media and their excessive consumption reveal the growing presence of intrusive technologies and systems of exchange, which deepen isolation and confinement rather than alleviate them.

Text by Juan Lopez
Curated by Lesdavq