WHAT’S LEFT UNSAID? UNBOUND NARRATIVES | EMBODIES LANGUAGE AT ATLANTA CONTEMPORARY
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
Review by Ming Joi
Speechlessness is seldom experienced by a woman of words like me, but what is there to say when the artworks do all the talking / take the words out of my mouth / speak for the silent moments / phrase it in a way my tongue would never try? In Unbound Narratives: Embodied Language, a group show at Atlanta Contemporary, Bethany Collins, February James, adriene nieves, and Gabi Madrid challenge the unsaid; instead, the inner thoughts, personal vocabularies, and living libraries of women artists are laid bare, stripped of form, and transformed into raw, fluid material.
Curator Karen Comer Lowe organized this exhibition as a complement to the GA Women’s to Watch Book Art Revolution, and both shows are on view at Atlanta Contemporary until May 17, 2026. In our age of threats to literacy and arts education, being bookish has become an aesthetic weapon; these shows employ visual artists as creative writers, encouraging close reading. Rightfully so, the literary and visual arts have long been complementary learning tools.
For Bethany Collins, words and language are her material. White Noise and Erasure series are early responsive works completed during Collins's graduate studies at Georgia State. An Alabama native now based in Chicago, Collins experienced the “often-awkward and sometimes-stilted conversations concerning race and racial identity in graduate critiques, studio visits, conversations among friends, or even inquiries from strangers,” during her time in the South. Her chalkboard drawings obscure the hateful messages into delicate abstractions that, from afar, read as a starry night sky or textural TV static. Collins controlled black and white palette reveals the gray areas between words, their uses, and meanings. The blackboard drawings, such as So What Are You? (White Noise) are joined by works on paper of Collins’ Erasure series. The series title explaining the process, Collins erased entries of Webster’s New World Dictionary, rubbing, chewing, and obscuring the definitions of “mixed” and other terms that denote race.