PATRON is proud to present Dusk, our fourth solo exhibition with Chicago-based artist Bethany Collins. Continuing narratives and bodies of work included in her recent institutional presentations in the Prospect 6 Triennial New Orleans, as well as her solo exhibition At Sea at The Seattle Art Museum, Dusk brings together five bodies of work composed of paintings and drawings on paper along with sculpture.

Dusk, as a moment in time, is defined by an anticipated immersion into darkness. The loss of light is as pivotal to its encounter as the acceptance of its impending absence. Through the use of language, both written and visualized, Collins’s recent work reflects on the metaphoric potential of one story, to be our collective warning and guide. While dusk brings the night, we enter the darkness together.

Orchestrating the heart of the exhibition are three new paintings from Collins’s The Battle Hymn of the Republic series. Arguably the most familiar early American contrafactum—a song in which the melody remains constant while the lyrics are rewritten over time—versions of The Battle Hymn of the Republic have been adapted in support of varying political causes, including revolution, temperance, suffrage, labor, secession, and abolition, articulating often contradictory versions of what it means to be American. Emerging from cloudy, gray- washed backgrounds, Collins’s gestural marks form fragments of lyrical excerpts from alternate versions of the war-time anthem. The phrases included are drawn from adaptations of the song which lean on floral references as universal symbols of grief, renewal, and peace. Bleeding down the paper and abstracted into gesture, Collins translates the intended unifying voices of the lyrics’ symbology into illegible noise.

Dusk premieres a series of graphite drawings adapted from commercially available floral lithographs produced during the second half of the 19th century. Now housed in the Library of Congress, Collins considers these reproductions of bouquets and arrangements of roses as a persistent American symbol (the rose would be named a top contender for national flower in the 1920s, an honor formalized in 1986 by President Regan). Shrouded in plumes of charcoal dust, these household images of beauty are, in Collins’s work, disturbed and muddled, reflecting the tempestuous nature of the time.

For three new bodies of work, Collins draws inspiration from Herman Melville’s 1851 novel, Moby Dick, or The Whale. Historian Nathaniel Philbrick refers to the novel as an “American Bible,” a literary exploration of loss, salvation and the dark consequences of an unrepentant spirit. Or, The Whale. Vol 1., 2024 -2025, is the first of a three volume portfolio that was created by Collins handwriting the entirety of the novel in iron gall ink onto onion skin paper. Ubiquitous from the late Middle Ages through the 19th century, iron gall ink was originally chosen precisely for its “outstanding permanence.” Eventually, this lauded fixity shifted to an inherent vice as the ink’s chemical makeup produced an inevitable corrosion. The ink may eventually eat through the delicate paper, rendering Collins’s adaptation of the original language, like that in her subsequent drawings, largely illegible. Yet, the laborious gestural text remains a doggedly futile act of care and preservation.

Moby Dick, Vol. 1, 2 and 3 extend Collins’s Loss series, a body of work which began as a search for the language of endings through expressive and often romantic language. The exhibition includes three graphite drawings, each of which reproduces a single page from the original volumes of Melville’s novel. Through a process of physically rubbing away, or erasing the majority of the reproduced language, Collins leaves only phrases that describe, in violent or post-apocalyptic terms, the sea. Ending the exhibition with a line from Melville’s final chapter recasts our attention from the end to the persistence of “the sea … which rolls on as it rolled five thousand years ago.” Functioning as memorials to a language, land, or reality lost, are three related “erasure” sculptures, created from the erosion of a blue eraser, reduced to nearly dust after the physical removal of language from a page. The sculptures offer a type of non-textual postscript. Each contains the essence of the story, when language itself has faded away.

Positioned on the threshold of uncertainty between past, present, and future, Dusk bears witness to the fleetingness of time as well as the permanence of attentive language and bond. Each shared expression—an epic tale, a national flower or an ever-changing anthem—is an attempt to weather the dark together.