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Terry Karson was born and raised in Kansas City, MO. He earned a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute, and an MFA from Montana State University, Bozeman. Over a long, productive career Karson has been an arts administrator, professor, and curator in addition to his long standing studio practice. He has been in dozens of group and solo exhibits, with an upcoming exhibition at MAM this fall.
I have always had a fascination with old, time worn, manmade surfaces - walls, floors, buildings, barns, rusting metal signs, old carpets, anything that shows the ravages of age. Surfaces that thousands, perhaps even millions, of eyes have seen and hands have touched. There is a rich history in these surfaces that compels me. In my travels through Turkey in the last few years I discovered the tiled surfaces in the mosques and museums and markets that truly appealed to my personal sense of the grid, of disrupted patterns, of the history of the materials, of time. I have always strived in my work to have order and chaos coexist. The idea of tiles fit seamlessly with my chosen materials of cardboard packaging, which by their very nature are chaotic. When these chaotic materials are organized in a grid, they become very similar to, but completely different than, the source of their inspiration. These materials have a completely opposing history and intention of the porcelain tiles of Turkey on their sordid path from the forest, through the pulp mill, to the grocery store shelf where their sole purpose is to grab a shopper's attention for a single moment, induce them to buy a product, then end their brief journey in the landfill. On the one hand there are the meticulously handmade, hand glazed, sophisticated, complex, and precisely patterned centuries old tiles created and arranged to evoke a sense of sublime beauty and permanence, while on the other hand there is the crass, corporate, commercial branding of the cardboard packaging. While one says, "See how seamlessly I fit into the whole", the other says, "me, me, me, look at me." While one relishes the overall harmony of purpose and the subjugation of the individual to the whole, the other celebrates the visual cacophony of advertising and the subjugation of the whole to the individual. It is within these contrasts that I am working in.
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