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Bethany Collins, Old Ship Rose II, 2025. Cast paper with Confederate granite
Bethany Collins, Moby Dick (Epilogue), 2025
Graphite on Somerset paper, 119.1 cm x 82.9 cm x 4.4 cm. Presented by Alexander Gray Associates
Alexander Gray Associates presents two powerful works by Bethany Collins, and beautiful works by legendary artist Melvin Edwards. I am obsessed with how the viewer must work to get the goods — and the goods are good. Collins erases Herman Melville’s text until only spectral fragments remain, including ‘one did survive’ and ‘now liberated by reason’. She turns the sea into a metaphor for migration, disappearance and return, letting language thin like a veil into atmosphere.
Bethany Collins, Old Ship Rose II, 2025
Cast paper with Confederate granite, 24.1 x 22.9 x 10.2 cm. Presented by Alexander Gray Associates
Cast in paper infused with granite dust from a destroyed Confederate monument, this rose form becomes a vessel of remembrance and refusal. Collins transforms sacred architecture into something handheld, insisting that Black spiritual sites endure as spaces where memory, refuge and resistance are held together.
Melvin Edwards, Untitled, 1968
Watercolour and ink on paper, 56.2 x 71.4 x 4.1 cm. Presented by Alexander Gray Associates
This watercolour and ink drawing compresses gesture into something taut and electric, hovering between abstraction and tool-like silhouettes. The work is tethered to Edwards’s ‘Lynch Fragment’ series that has come to define his sculptural language....
