Abigail Raphael Collins Mines the Military-Entertainment Complex

As a child in the 1990s, not yet able to distinguish fact from fiction, Abigail Raphael Collins thought that her father was a military officer. The reasoning was sound in her mind: her grandfather had been in the navy, and her father often came home in uniform. It wasn’t until later that Collins learned he was a method actor. His longest-running role was playing the truculent Alexander Nelson, a former Navy Secretary propelled by paranoia, on the court martial serial JAG (1995–2005).

Collins was, in essence, a foil to those children who were told that their parents in the CIA were civilian paper-pushers. Her video BLACKOUT (2017–25) queries whether her father’s tendency to play military roles stems from the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) he developed after experiencing the Blitz as a child in London. A tension emerges between what she believes and what he remembers. She recalls a moment when they returned to London during her adolescence. A siren went off and her father collapsed to the ground. It was then she realized he had suffered a serious trauma. Though he is sensitive to her story, he cannot quite engage. ‘How do I know what I don’t remember?’, he asks.

On view at REDCAT in the shadow of the Hollywood Hills, Collins’s eponymous exhibition ‘BLACKOUT’ investigates the multi-pronged ways in which the US military has influenced the television and film industry since the first studios were established over a century ago. The artist’s hunch about her father begets bigger connections. She interviews an erstwhile scriptwriter for JAG, who elaborates on collaborations between the military and entertainment crews: the former provides access to information and equipment if the latter shares an advanced copy of the script. Sometimes the military’s media relations removes material; sometimes it adds it. One subject is always off limits: PTSD.

BLACKOUT is projected on a stage flat in the corner of the gallery. Hung on the opposite side is a monitor displaying the film Without Whose Cooperation (2025), which compiles credits from over 200 Hollywood features made possible by the collaboration described by the JAG writer. The sheer volume of this archive is replicated in a nearby sculpture, OCPA Weekly Report (2025–ongoing). This teeming stack of proposals from studios seeking military support uncannily recalls a publisher’s slush pile.

In walkthroughs, Collins encourages visitors to rifle through these reports, which she obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. As with the credits in Without Whose Cooperation, the OCPA reports bespeak Collins’s primary motivation: to demonstrate that the military-entertainment complex is not a hidden conspiracy, but easily accessible. Hence her interest in night vision technology, which discloses the concealed. A series of works on paper (‘Nightvision’, all 2025) juxtaposes neon green night vision scenes of aircraft carriers and compound raids with military memos about JAG and the film Zero Dark Thirty (2012).

Yet access has its limits. Much of the information in these memos has been redacted for national security reasons. To fill in the blanks, Collins turns to the green screen, which frames her father in a key moment in BLACKOUT. Interviews with a military role-player and videographer function as his foils: their responsibilities are to prepare soldiers for combat and document war for posterity. In contrast, green screen is a technology of superimposition – it enables us to imagine what might be blacked out by redaction ink. A script the elder Collins table-reads conjures a court martial scene in which PTSD is actually named. Seeking insight into his psyche, the younger Collins asks him to react to its redactions, revealing a second, more personal and provisional thesis – a daughter’s drive to understand a father shrouded in darkness.

Abigail Raphael Collins’s ‘BLACKOUT’ is on view at REDCAT, Los Angeles, until 10 August

^{Main image: Abigail Raphael Collins, ‘Nightvision’, 2025, exhibition view, archival pigment prints, documents obtained through FOIA requests, each 51 × 61 cm. Courtesy: REDCAT, Los Angeles; photograph: Yubo Dong, ofstudio}