Tribeca, New York
Zach Collins
I Want to Believe
Locker RoomThe Locker Room is thrilled to present a solo exhibition by Zach Collins as the fifth show in our new space. Brooklyn based artist Zach Collins operates as a cultural archivist and obsessive researcher, creating deeply studied paintings that transform specific cultural phenomena into investigations of belief. His practice spans seemingly disparate subjects, from Paul Verhoeven’s “Show Girls” reframed through Greek mythology, the inadvertent homoeroticism of home improvement television, to UFO believers and club kids. Each series emerges from deep research, with Collins isolating charged details from his source materials to reveal the underlying urges that drive these narratives and communities. I Want To Believe examines a singular cultural moment—1990’s UK, where rave culture and UFO conspiracy merged into one transcendent search for contact. Collins traces this convergence through historical touchpoints, revealing how communities separated by belief systems can share strikingly similar visual languages and hopes for transformation. The series of paintings is staged as conversation rather than chronology. The exhibition serves as an invitation for visitors to trace their own pathways between Collins' paintings and discover how different communities have used similar visual strategies to document their search for transcendence. What emerges is not a linear narrative but a mapping of connection, drawing from what appears to be an endless archive of digital media, magazine scans, video stills, and subcultural ephemera that speaks to our post-internet condition of infinite reference and perpetual documentation.