An offshoot of the artist’s ongoing Odyssey series, Bethany Collins’s Aeneid series presents hand-written passages taken from Virgil’s epic blown up to a monumental scale. Painstakingly erasing the text using a Pink Pearl, her hands, and even her saliva, Collins removes virtually all the text except for select passages highlighting variations in different translations of the ancient Latin poem. Whereas Collins’s Odyssey series explores Odysseus’s melancholic return to a home no longer familiar, her Aeneid works focus on Aeneas’s experience lost at sea. Reflective of America’s current political moment, the series captures the experiences of an unmoored and increasingly lost populace.
