AN ARTIST TAKES A COLLAGE-MAKING APPROACH TO

by Edward M. Gómez, in dialogue with Jim Colquhoun

For the Scottish artist Jim Colquhoun, his drawings, performance pieces, and assorted writings are all thematically related; marked by an inescapable strain of dry humor, they all share a kind of finger-in-your-eye attitude that challenges notions about perception, how subjects may be depicted, and even the essential character of drawing itself.

Colquhoun has long been aware of and influenced by the basic principles of conceptual art, but his work does not resemble the scientific-sounding, documentary-style realizations of the kinds of propositional projects that are often representative of and closely associated with the genre.

Instead, throughout Colquhoun’s work there runs a current of transgressive-subversive energy that calls attention to itself as it challenges conventional assumptions about the form a work of art can or should take and about what art can or should try to express or achieve. Call it this artist’s own fundamental aesthetic-philosophical concept, one that has fueled his art-making for many years.