Groundbreaking artist Bethany Collins harnesses the poetic potential of paper

“Paper is fragile and temporary. It heals itself but it retains abrasions on its surface,” Bethany Collins said during a video call in the days before her exposure.Undercurrents» with Alexander Gray Associates in New York. “It shows it all: the life of the newspaper. It’s as much a metaphor for the body as I can find in material form,” she explained.

The exhibition, on view until December 16, 2023, is her first with the gallery, which she joined at the end of last year. “Undercurrents” traces Collins’ interrogation of language, text and the limits of paper as a medium. The exhibition traverses four key bodies of work, which touch on everything from ancient Greek literature to the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020.

A more recent addition to his practice is a series of molded paper works, part of the “Old Ship” series. “They’re not language-based, so the work makes me nervous,” Collins said with a laugh. Created with handmade paper mixed with pink granite dust from the base of the since-dismantled Confederate Monument at Stonewall Jackson in Charlottesville, Virginia, the works are cast in the form of architectural details of the Old Ship AME Zion Church , the oldest black church in Montgomery. , Alabama, Collins’ hometown. Produced in collaboration with Dieu Donné in Brooklyn, these works will be exhibited with LAXART and MOCA LA in 2025. “I like this idea that the monument to a traitor who has been exalted for so long in the landscape, whose destruction could then help in the support of another type of monument. It is also another space, another community, another story that is much more worth remembering.

The exhibition continues with a selection of “song drawings,” works that address contrafactum, a term used in music to describe songs in which the melody remains unchanged, but the lyrics are changed. One of the main sources Collins used, enlisting the help of a composer to create the compositions, was the song “The Bonnie Blue Flag”, which was widely sung by Confederate soldiers during the Civil War, the Union soldiers adapting and creating their own interpretations – the latter of which Collins used exclusively in the work.

“I worked with a composer to transpose the song into circular scores to imitate Haydn’s. Ten Commandments circular partitions, their infinite quality. And then they also become polytonal, they’re very chaotic and disturbing,” says Collins. “I only work with union versions, so there is this attempt to resist the predominant narrative.”

The works also feature clouds of charcoal reminiscent of the tear gas used during protests in summer 2020, inspired specifically by images taken in South Carolina – the first state to secede – and published in the newspaper of the state. “The drawings, I hope, are a way of collapsing and haunting time; 2020 didn’t come out of nowhere. Much of this goes back to our past.

Also focusing on the American Civil War era, the “Lost Friends” series traces Collins’ research into a specific type of notice written by individuals seeking to locate friends or family members once reduced to slavery. These messages were printed in newspapers, posted publicly, or read in churches starting in the years just before the end of the Civil War and continuing through the 1920s. Commonalities in the texts found by Collins: “Can you m help find my people? “I am all alone in the world” or “Will Southern ministers read this from your pulpits” – created a “kind of chorus of nostalgia”. Isolating quotes from these notices and blindly embossing them on a monochrome background, the works center the psychological anguish of loss and uncertainty in the aftermath of war.

The “Antigone” series goes deeper into the depths of the story. “I’ve been working with epics for a while now, since the 2016 election,” Collins said. “All of these great texts that we turn to in times of crisis for metaphors for how to deal with each present moment we are experiencing, we look to the past. They suck all the oxygen out of the room.

Here, Collins uses his own saliva to erase and obscure part of the printed text, which is reproduced on several panels. “Spitting is also important because it is a way of inserting my body into the work and exercising control. The language seems so heavy-handed, and often what should make sense doesn’t make sense. Thus, the insertion of my body and its erasure is a way of becoming master of this cumbersome system.

The lines and passages left untouched highlight moments of extreme drama, uncertainty and resolution – notions that resonate across time and space from antiquity to the present, and speak of ” “Undercurrent” unifying the exhibition: these are the small repeated acts. , both individual and collective, which bind our humanity and connect us to past generations as well as those of the future.

“’Antigone’ and ‘Lost Friends’ are centuries apart and are very different people and circumstances, but they are both responses to the aftermath of the Civil War. This kind of chorus of nostalgia, they both become a kind of chorus that collapses time. And I think it’s not just a kind of resistance and ritual, but it also indicates a faith in reunification, that what you do still matters, even then .”

Although Collins’s widespread use of paper in his practice functions as a metaphorical stand-in for the body and offers myriad conceptual avenues of inquiry, it is perhaps its everyday quality that gives his work an exceptional level of resonance. Engaging along historical lines, both in terms of events and lived experiences, his meticulous and detailed interventions – their act and their index – in and on paper materially embody the central theme of the exhibition: “ all of “Undercurrents” is about small choices as acts of resistance. Mourning and ritual as resistance. This is the heart of the show.

The exhibition is an exceptional time to become acquainted with Collins’ poetic style and materially resonant work. Earlier this year, it was announced that she was the recipient of the Seattle Art Museum’s (SAM) Gwendolyn Knight and Jacob Lawrence Prize for 2024. The prize, given every two years to an early-career Black artist, grants also to the winner $15,000 to advance his practice. as a solo exhibition at SAM, which Collins will display next year, another in a series of important moments in his career.

For Collins, 2021 was also a banner year, with three independent institutional solo exhibitions held across the United States. “My Destiny is in Your Hands” at the Museum of Fine Arts in Montgomery, Alabama; “Evensong” at the Frist Art Museum, Nashville, Tennessee; and the debut of “America: A Hymnal” at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas.

The Crystal Bridges exhibition focused on the work America: a song (2017), an immersive piece that explores 100 versions of the anthem My country is yours, which underwent rewritings between the 18th and 20th centuries to support various causes. Here, the written versions are linked chronologically in an artist’s book. Collins burned the notes from the score with a laser. A sound work, installed in the room, relays six different voices singing all 100 versions at once – a cacophony, but a familiar dissonance nonetheless. The different melodies and lyrics remain recognizable. America: a song is currently on display at the Peabody Essex Museum, through 2024, in a gallery lined with a new work of flocked flower silhouettes referencing floriography, or the symbolic language of flowers.

“I’m interested in repetition. I’m always looking for the chorus that happens over time. Without this refrain, I cannot make sense of the story. Repetition is sometimes an indictment, sometimes it haunts, sometimes it comforts.

“Bethany Collins: Undercurrents» is on view at Alexander Gray Associates until December 16, 2023.

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