Bethany Collins

BETHANY COLLINS
b. 1984 Montgomery, AL
Lives and works in Chicago, IL

Bethany Collins is a multidisciplinary artist whose conceptually driven work is fueled by a critical exploration of how race and language interact. In her Contronym series, for instance, Collins transposes definitions from Webster’s New World Dictionary of American Language onto American Masters paper, then aggressively obscures much of the entries with an eraser. What remain are specific snippets of meaning that are poetically charged through their isolation, as well as the crumbled paper bits left behind by her erasing.

Collins is interested in the unnerving possibility of multiple meanings, dual perceptions, and limitlessness in the seemingly binary. Drawing repeatedly allows for a fuller understanding of objects in space, while defining and redefining her own racial landscape. Racial identity has neither been instantly formed nor conjured in isolation. Rather, identity entangles memory: actual and revisited, cultural and historical, individual and collective. Through the dissolution of dichotomies and exploration of language, this work recalls moments in the formation of her racial identity as Black and Biracial. And each re-worked mark is yet another attempt to navigate the binary paradigm of race in the American South. From her earlier White Noise to more recent Southern Review series, each new body of work borders on an obsessive preoccupation with language- it’s ability and inability to negotiate a way of being in the world. But there is in her practice a delight in these obsessive preoccupations and in the solutions they slowly, ever so slowly, but inevitably offer.

Submitted by Patron