Samantha Persons & Christopher Wallace Surface Dwellers

With an arsenal of 0.40-millimeter pens, Christopher Wallace and Samantha Persons tackle notions of narrative, pattern, and obsession. Surface Dwellers consists of drawings, wallpaper, sculpture, and nostalgia, with a dash of science-fiction. Persons and Wallace create non-hierarchical drawings using color as a means of collage and differentiation. The eye becomes visual saturated from the artists’ kenophobia. Looking to the history of printmaking—particularly Dürer, Goya and Schirmer—Wallace narrates such themes as nostalgia, technology, myth and Internet culture. Using hand-drawn pattern and symmetry Persons creates the illusion of mechanical production, highlighting topics of feminism, textiles and gender/queering. Embracing the empirical flatness of paper, Persons and Wallace question what it means to be terrestrial beings trapped in a self-contained starship traveling 1.3 million miles an hour through space.