Bethany Collins Gallery Talk

Join us for an evening with exhibiting artist Bethany Collins as she discusses her current exhibition, The Deluge, while offering insight into the role of text and translation in her practice and how meaning unfolds through movement rather than certainty.

In The Deluge, Collins works through transcription, erasure, and reinterpretation to trace language as a force in motion—shaping, eroding, and returning across time. Drawing from sources such as Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Sophocles’ Antigone, and the shifting cadences of a national hymn, her work reveals how meaning persists even as it slips beyond fixed control.

On Wednesday, July 1, at 7PM, the Holiday Theater presents To The Person Sitting in Darkness (2026), curated by Bethany Collins and named after Mark Twain’s scorching 1901 critique of American imperialism. To the Person Sitting in Darkness (2026) consists of multiple versions of The Battle Hymn of the Republic sung simultaneously. As the lights of the historic theater imperceptibly fade, Twain’s haunting version of the wartime anthem serves as the cantus firmus – the consistent and pernicious underpinning of the entire work, endlessly repeating and rolling back on itself. The performance ends as the theater submerges into total darkness. Free RSVP.