Review

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.)

-re-