Language is the star, the ship, the sea, and the wreck in Bethany Collins’s “Dusk,” now on view at Patron. A provocative exhibition rendered in graphite gray hues, its eerie twilight unfolds across endless sheets of paper like thoughts fumbling toward silence. Only vitrines of powdered and spent eraser offer a shock of brightness here, small hills of sky blue flare like lighthouse beacons amid the exhibition’s otherwise ashen hues.

At the center: her hand-transcribed copy of Moby-Dick , a devotion bordering on absurdity. For Melville, the ocean was an unfathomable expanse, sublime in its terror and infinity. In recasting the text by hand, Collins reframes this abyss for the present, her fragile pages of fugitive iron gall ink invoking not only the sea’s endlessness but somehow the equal

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