In recent years, Collins’s engagement with music has expanded to encompass immersive sound installations. Often employing polyphonic singing, installations like America: A Hymnal (2019) draw on alternative iterations of popular songs, collapsing the many different—and often oppositional—meanings they accumulate over time. In America: A Hymnal, six different voices perform 100 variations of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” resulting in an unsettling cacophony that is disorienting yet hauntingly familiar. Eschewing vocal harmony, these installations employ competing voices to examine the language that informs identities, capturing, per Collins, “dissenting versions of what it means to be … American bound together.”
