Bethany Collins created her White Noise (2010) series while pursuing her Master of Fine Arts at Georgia State University. Drawing upon her personal experience during studio critiques, Collins used white chalk on a painted black background to inscribe problematic and troubling questions and suggestions made by white classmates. Smearing some portions of the text to render them partially illegible and clustering together other small letterforms to achieve a more recognizable, but comparable effect, Collins establishes what she refers to as a “give-and-take” dynamic with the viewer. “Both are ways for me to control not only the problematic language that necessitated the chalkboard piece, but also the viewer’s new relationship to it.” Further charging the work with pain—both emotional and physical—Collins used her own fingers to erase the text, repeating the process until the physical pain became too much to bear.
