AIA Kansas City: The American Institute of Architects

Opening Friday, January 18, 2010, 6-9pm / Artist remarks: 6pm
+ Public Program: Tea Party – Conversation, Wednesday, January 27, 7pm
Exhibition runs January 19-February 6, 2010
Hours: Thursdays + Saturdays, 12-5pm

Charlotte Street Foundation’s Urban Culture Project is pleased to present Commodity, Commotion, Communication, an installation of new work by Kansas City based artist and Urban Culture Project Studio Resident Samantha “Sammy” Persons. The exhibition opens at Urban Culture Project Space, 21 East 12th Street, with a Third Friday reception on January 18, 6-9pm, with artist remarks at 6pm.

A manipulator of signs more than a producer of art objects, Persons constructs “paintings” and interactive sculptural environments from materials drawn from her own lifetime and which signal the difference between Art and non- art identified objects—her materials palette includes house paint, vinyl letters, art books and catalogs, theoretical texts, bendy straws, extension cables, air fresheners, Plexiglas, television static, fluorescent lights, life-sized Hanna Montana Stickers, highlighters, and glitter, among much else.

In part, Persons’ calculated barrage of fragments and collaged images signifies the saturation of text/media in contemporary culture. At the same time, this field of partial and re-contextualized information is meant to position the viewer as an active reader of messages rather than passive contemplator of the aesthetic or consumer of the spectacular. “Within my installations, I attempt to create a new experience out of real objects. There is always and will always be new definitions to old signifiers. The process of montage, collage, and assemblage does not reproduce the real, but constructs an object. My work strives to reach a point of instantaneous lightning flashes of paradoxical illumination,” writes Persons.

Further, by appropriating traditionally gendered materials, such as 2 by 4’s, which she paints bright pink, as well as by building up the surfaces of painting with stickers, which have a long historical correlation to femininity and decoration, the artist seeks to heighten tension between masculine support and feminine façade, destabilizing our standard readings of familiar products and materials.

“Within this installation I hope to lay the foundation of my own personal archive,” writes Persons. “I am a product of my environment….Calling upon techniques in art history I wish not only to illustrate the material but also contextualize it in terms of the present, creating identity in my work through the cross-germination of knowledge and theory with experience and intuition… I do not hide my sources, in fact I embrace their history though the creation of my own.”

Samantha Persons received her BFA in Sculpture and Art History from Kansas City Art Institute in 2008. Her work has been presented in exhibitions at Artists Space, New York; H&R Block Artspace at Kansas City Art Institute; Crossroads Gallery, Kansas City; Red Star Studios, Kansas City; and Dolphin Gallery, Kansas City, among others.