Samantha Persons

Samantha Persons shows Commodity, Commotion, Communication at Urban Culture Project

By Chris Packham

Published on January 26, 2010 at 12:50pm

In a provocative essay titled “Image of the Decade: Osama and the Towers,” published by salon.com on the last day of 2009, freelance critic Matt Zoller Seitz argues that all art produced over the last decade has been about the terror attacks of September 11, 2001.

Asserting that the burning towers were an overriding and “slightly unreal, iconic, representative” image — the work of terrorist as artist — Seitz writes that the day’s horror “forced every artist in every medium to start each new piece by first asking if the work was meant to confront the image of the burning towers or deliberately avoid it.” You can vent your outrage at Seitz’s suggestion that the attacks were the work of an artist, but the broad impact of the televised imagery is undeniable.

It’s worth looking at the Urban Culture Project’s first exhibition of 2010 through the lens of Seitz’s thesis. Samantha “Sammy” Persons graduated from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2008. That her education occurred entirely during post-9/11 wartime means she’s among the first generation of artists trained during this deeply fucked-up period. Media-savvy and conscious of her work’s social context, Persons is innately aware of the broader cultural influences on her art.

Commodity, Commotion, Communication, a bright and busy installation of Persons’ mixed-media work, is an exhibit of ideas more than objects. It’s seemingly as far removed from history’s direness as the artist herself: Charmingly gawky and completely appealing during her artist’s talk at the exhibit’s opening party, she spoke about the media’s outsized influence on social conditioning. “Consumerism has eaten away at us and made us who we are,” she said. After the attacks, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said, “Show your confidence. Show you’re not afraid. Go to restaurants. Go shopping.” It’s doubtful that the former mayor and other authority figures intended to sow suspicion of the marketplace, but advertisers have been groping for the levers of consumer desire for so long that it’s weird when politicians do it, particularly in the context of a national crisis.

Normalcy in America is defined by what we purchase and use up. It comforts us. This manifests in Persons’ work with such disposable artifacts as glitter, adhesive googly eyeballs and stickers featuring SpongeBob SquarePants, Hannah Montana, American flags and sparkly dollar signs — all of it scattered and collaged across her work like the debris of a preteen girl’s exploded Trapper Keeper. Stickers are usually favored by young girls, and Persons addresses gender-specific advertising in one such collage, “I Am Herstory, I Am Making History, I Am a Part of Herstory, I Am Fighting History.” Edged with the plastic triangular flags familiar from used-car lots, the piece is displayed parallel to the floor, like a table around which viewers gather. Its surface is dense and nearly unreadable with stickers, glitter and paint.

It’s an accepted convention for artists to incorporate mass-produced ephemera, logos and colorful off-the-rack cultural output, but Persons’ use of the stickers feels original, makes the work her own, the way stickers make a 13-year-old girl’s notebook her own. Her complicated and deceptively childlike surfaces — what Persons calls the “sugar coating” — reveal her interest not so much in what’s hidden behind the façade, but in what might be.

“Warn Us …” consists of Christmas lights stapled to the gallery drywall, arranged to spell out a slogan in cursive. Christmas lights are gaudily attractive, Persons noted in her talk. She added that anyone can use holiday lights to decorate a broken home. It takes a comically long time to read, walking back and forth across the piece to sound out each word: “Warn us of the seduction of media offerings and expose the detachment of contemporary experience from natural experience.” The work suggests a media-numbed American disengagement with reality, and the viewer is forced to engage with the piece simply to read it.

It is this numbness and disconnection, Seitz suggests in his essay, that terrorists attacked on 9/11 with a flamboyant and horrifying act. Persons addresses this American detachment, suggesting its media origins in several works. The upper level of “Foundation of Communication,” a 16-foot-high plywood structure evoking a kid’s fort, is accessed with a ladder. Inside, a monitor displays a video of the artist applying paint to a small stepladder that appears in the piece’s lower level. The grace note: Every few minutes, the video is intercut with commercials for American Express and other companies, suggesting her awareness that her own work is the product of a culture shaped largely by Madison Avenue.

And that represents a partial validation of Seitz’s essay, which posits a simplistic binary choice: Artists are either addressing 9/11 or avoiding it, echoing the president’s assertion that “you’re with us or you’re with the terrorists.” It’s probably truer to say that art is an inevitable response to a given cultural environment, and ours was reshaped eight and a half years ago when extremists crashed airplanes into it. The scar is evident in our television shows, at the airport security line, even in so prosaic a place as the DMV. We swim in that water. Persons mostly addresses broad American generalities in her brainy work, seldom zooming in on the specific or the personal. She’s a young artist, and what she thinks about the world is evident in her art. How she feels about the world is a work in progress.

CONCEPTIONS OF IDENTITY

A review of Samantha Persons’ Commodity, Commotion, Communication

Samantha Persons, “Commodity, Commotion, Communication,” installation view, opening night, January 15 2010. Join Persons and fellow artists Kurt Flecksing, Lynley Farris and Robert Heishman in an open dialogue and tea party public program on January 27 at 7 p.m. in the gallery. Photo: Paul Shortt, courtesy of Charlotte Street Foundation

Urban Culture Project Space
Kansas City, Missouri
January 15 — February 6 2010

Walking into Samantha Persons’ installation Commodity, Commotion, Communication is rather like walking in on a child’s birthday party, or into used car lot, the space is so filled with lights and bright colors, with balloons and strings of plastic bunting. The seven pieces in the exhibition use these, and similar materials, with such repetition that they give the viewer the ability to take one long look into the mind and identity of the artist.

Hanging on the wall that separates the Project Space from the Paragraph Gallery, the diptych I am not a… Painting… Combine… Commodity is made of two lit panels coated in carefully articulated geometric planes of color and, in an almost contradictory way, glittering, plasticy stickers, which give the initial impression of a young girl’s school notebook. But by using building materials with these craft supplies and bright, almost gaudy, paints, Persons pushes us past this reacting and into the realization of an uneasy feeling of femininity and youth as dictated by a consumerist and media-heavy culture. I am not a… shares this materiality with I am Herstory, I am making History, I am a part of Herstory, I am fighting History, a panel mounted on legs and festooned with plastic flags, with the the taped-out geometrics and precise color planes covered in pools of Hello Kitty stickers, glitter, and craft googly eyes. The identity of the artist is quietly articulated by the vinyl letters spelling the title against each edge and by the small “I AM ART” near one edge. How much of life (whether it is the artist’s or your own), it asks the viewer, is a performance?

Samantha Persons, “I am Herstory, I am making History, I am a part of Herstory, I am fighting History,” pennant flags, incandescent bulb, acrylic and mixed medium on panel, 69.25” x 78.5” x 25”, 2010. Photo: Jared Panick, courtesy of Charlotte Street Foundation

Persons uses these sort of contrary materials — wood panels are covered with stickers and glitter, Styrofoam is partially coated in day-glo house paint — without presenting any ill-fitting contradictions. Thanks, in part, to the familiarity of the materials used, the artist is able to show these culturally disparate ideas as one thought; that is, each piece is a combination of what is used to build, and what is used to obscure and decorate — a decision that the artist states is representative of the masculine and feminine.

The stickers give the viewer an ironic sense of naivety, particularly the character stickers, which so innocently crowd next to sparkling hearts and dollar bills. Hello Kitty, her identically-faced “family” members, pre-teen idol Hannah Montana, and cartoon character Spongebob Squarepants — intended, as so many things are, for children — have been converted to icons of different forms of sexuality and maturity. It is not hard to imagine that these are the interpretations Persons is using, with Hello Kitty a kitschy grab at childhood and Hannah Montana and Spongebob perceived more or less as sexual beings.* The sheer saturation of these copyrighted characters leads them away from what they are — children’s entertainment — and into what they have become: examples of feminine stereotypes for both the male and female gender.

Samantha Persons, installation view showing “Foundation of Communication” (left) and “I am a Fake” (right). Photo: Jared Panick, courtesy of Charlotte Street Foundation

The idea of gender in its most basic stereotypes is clear in  I am a Fake. Painted with carefully articulated planes of color, one Styrofoam panel has been mounted with a print of Jan Vermeer’s Milkmaid. The print has been worked on and then whitewashed over, with the words “I AM A FAKE” spelled out with sticker letters, clearly visible under the paint. A second panel, angled up from the floor, has a plastic banana trapped under heavy pours of paint. The images here — the desexualized working woman, the false phallic element of the banana — begin to take away and question the sexual elements of gender. Though there are icons of the masculine and feminine in the piece, they are stripped of any power they might have.

Samantha Persons, “Foundation of Communication,” mixed media, 148” x 192” x 192”, 2010. Photo: Paul Shortt, courtesy of Charlotte Street Foundation

Foundation of Communication is a pink and yellow structure, reminiscent of the kind of stilt houses built in New Guinea and China, but the upper room (a space walled with mirrors and housing a television on a white pedestal) does not rest over water. Instead, it is hoisted over a personal library, with piles of books on war, feminism, artists and art theory stacked onto candy-colored step-stools. An American flag, sewn into a large pillow, is lying in the middle; the symbol of our country and sometimes culture, the flag invites the viewer to rest in it and is surrounded by four televisions propped up on the same step-stools that hold the books, silently playing snowy static screens. This space, vibrant pink and yellow, is far more finished than the one above it, which is built out of raw and yellow-stained particle board. The upper space, which faces toward the back of the gallery, has a heavy office door, swung wide open and marked “Office of Processing Communication and Construction” and “Employees Only.” The light around the room (and it is important to note that every piece had the element of light in it) shines in pinks and blues, but the doorway is lit from the outside with a clip lamp, which leaves the dim space looking oddly sterile, in an almost unnerving way.

Samantha Persons, “Warn us…”, Christmas lights, zip-ties, silver pins, 148” x 133” x 60”, 2010. Photo: Paul Shortt

It is Persons’ Warn us…, which is made of partially-lit Christmas lights pulled into script, that makes an oddly strong impression, despite its minimal nature. “Warn us of the seduction of media offerings,” the lights spell out, “and expose the detachment of contemporary experience from natural experience.” This piece, for all its flickering kitsch, is the simplest one in the exhibition and is able to clearly underline what Persons has been saying with every sticker and paint stroke — that is, we are receiving, as individuals, as a culture, a false identity (in our conception of gender or otherwise); we are being fed plastic, and most of us do not know it, even when the truth is spelled out for us.

Note:
*(One only needs to spend a few minutes at a search engine of choice to find that Hello Kitty is part of a lot of grown-ups’ activities, from weddings to childbirth. Also, compared with Sponge Bob, whose sexuality has been a topic of debate in the media, Montana’s sexual persona is less thanks to the character herself and more to the actress who plays her.)

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