Bethany Collins’s artist books literalize the act of erasure by physically removing material. Her 2017 book, America: A Hymnal, collates one hundred different versions of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” written by causes ranging from the Confederacy to the Temperance Movement. Lasering out the musical notes, Collins excises the shared score that united these various adaptations until all that is left are bits of lasered paper— in the artist’s words, “the dust of language”—and a charred corpus to past (in)cohesion. “[Erasure] makes me feel I can control a text that feels out of my hands,” Collins explains. “I feel a physical mastering of language. By deciding what’s legible, I’m dragging out the meaning already there. Erasure, for me, means a nice sharp elbow.”
