A place for lost bois and girls | Samantha Persons
A place for lost bois and girls by Samantha Persons: This living installation- comprised of a series of fort-like cubbies on the 2nd floor of the museum- is in a state of flux, like the living museum itself. It was built using the scrap material from the 3rd floor woodshop area to fashion a structurally sound partitioning system in a room where artists, staff and interns create, work, and dream. Artists and visitors can change the items in these fort dwellings and therefore change the dwellings themselves. The process of fort-ification allows fort dwellers complex character amalgamation- the ability to take on the characters suggested by the space of the fort and to create evocations of new characters that might inhabit the fort. The first resident of the installation is Madison, a fictional character that Persons has been developing through her artistic practice. Madison is a self determined, young genderless feral-esque child, who is an obsessive observer and collector of objects. Among the artifacts that speak to Madison’s character and habitation in the dwelling are a rope latter, backpack, binoculars, animal fur cap, and a series of books: “Orphan, a Raccoon,” “ Robinson Crusoe” and “Explore a Spooky Swamp.”
