Bethany Collins’s A Pattern or Practice features 91 blind-embossed prints, representing pages taken from the U.S. Department of Justice report on the Ferguson, MO Police Department, following the murder of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a police officer. Signaling an important conceptual—and, indeed, emotional—departure from previous works, A Pattern or Practice represents the first time the artist used a text without any historical distance, amplifying the work’s already harrowing charge with the subject material’s undeniable immediacy. The work also represents the first introduction of blind-embossing in Collins’s practice. “Blind-embossing, to me, it’s like printing nothing,” Collins explains. “But it’s also printing that only occurs under a tremendous amount of pressure … it’s forcing the paper to do the work. It’s also really hard on your eyes. It’s a painful document to read, and it is the work of it, not just the text but also trying to make legible that text [that] is hard.”
