Urban Culture Project is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Kansas City based artist Teri Frame, opening at Project Space, 21 East 12th Street, on Third Friday, April 17, 6-9pm. The evening will include a live performance by the artist at 7:30 pm, which will be videotaped and exhibited in the gallery for the duration of the exhibition.
Frame will present work from two recent and ongoing series, which center on the human body and explore mnemismus, the notion that ancestral memory is stored within the body, and can be retrieved psychosomatically.
In her Beauty Marks series, Frame arranges images of invasive birthmarks into recurring patterns. By applying rules of proportion, symmetry and pattern to dermal “imperfections,” the artist examines the Western body politic and probes the sublime space between the beautiful and the grotesque. The works, presented as “specimen”-like digital prints, are part of an investigation that juxtaposes anomaly against ideal Western paradigms such as the Fibonacci sequence, the model of proportion as conveyed in Greek statuary, the Enlightenment concept of purity, and Nazi propaganda concerning the genetically “perfect” body.
Frame’s performance and related/resulting sculptural objects, stem from another series in which the artist employs raw clay masks and “prosthetics” as a means for altering her body. The plasticity of clay allows her to shift shape by sculpting and re-sculpting new limbs and epidermal layers; to penetrate the boundaries of her skin; to seek transubstantiation.
Teri Frame (b. 1971) received a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2005 and an MFA from The Pennsylvania State University in 2008. She has studied art in Hungary, Italy, and Mexico, and has exhibited across the United States and internationally. She has received numerous grants and awards, and was twice bestowed the Kenneth R. Ferguson merit scholarship. Her work was recently included in a three-person show held by the Ceramics Research Center in Tempe Arizona. The exhibition, entitled Midstream: New Ceramics from the Heartland, highlighted experimental ceramic work from emerging artists living in the mid-western United States, and was reviewed in Ceramics Monthly. Teri currently teaches art history at the Kansas City Art Institute, where she has recently created four theory-based courses regarding the body in art.
Teri Frame will present a lecture about her work on Thursday, May 7, 6pm at Project Space, 21 East 12th Street. This talk is free and open to the public.
An initiative of the Charlotte Street Foundation, Urban Culture Project creates new opportunities for artists of all disciplines and contributes to urban revitalization by transforming spaces in downtown Kansas City into new venues for multi-disciplinary contemporary arts programming. For more information, visit charlottestreet.org or e-mail info@charlottestreet.org.
