Bethany Collins

Bethany Collins is a multidisciplinary artist who focuses on critical exploration of how race and language interact. Drawing on a wide variety of documents, she erases, obscures, excerpts, and rewrites portions of text to bring to the fore issues revolving around race, power, and histories of violence. Untitled (Atrocity) is from her ongoing series The Southern Review. Applying charcoal to the pages taken from the Louisiana State University Press-published literary journal, Collins obscures the text. While these interventions could be perceived as redactions, Collins instead sees them as representative of her taking control of what it means to her to be a Southern artist. “I cannot help but see my obsession with language through the lens of my body,” Collins explains. “In the first Southern Review, I initially threw away those imperfect, messy, and ripped pages until realizing that my sooty fingerprints all over the surface was the work.” To Collins, these fingerprints and obfuscations “show the history of my touch and my reading,” embedding herself and her body into the narrative of the South.