Fri 7/12 @ 5-8PM

The 2022 CAN Triennial was mixed bag, with work by local artists spread confusingly over multiple galleries. But one of the strongest shows was at the former Gallery at CSU in Playhouse Square and its strongest work was a video by the artist Kasumi manipulating an image of the gallery’s curator Darius Steward. I watched it half a dozen times, mesmerized. It was a powerful representation of what the artist has built her successful career on: creating meaningful work through the repetition of images and symbols.

A number of regional museums and arts organizations selected artists from that triennial to mount full shows of their work, and Summit Artspace selected Kasumi for an Exhibition Prize. Her show, Persistence of Vision, a retrospective of her work from the late 1990s through today, goes on view in its Main Gallery Friday July 12, when it opens with a free public reception form 5-8pm, and remains on view through Saturday September 14. The show will feature not only her digital videos and films, but also prints, painting, collage, and installation among other mediums. Viewers will find common images, gestures and themes, many drawn from pop culture, across all her work.

“I’ve always been fascinated by the cyclical nature of history and human experience,” she says in the press release for the show. “This retrospective allows me to reflect on my own artistic journey, evolution and creative process. It allows me to examine the merging and interconnectedness of different elements and concepts within my work, and at the same time, realize that each mistake I made turned out to be another ‘portal of discovery’ (to paraphrase writer James Joyce). My work is about memory and the echo chambers of memory—a perpetual feedback loop of patterns that creates consciousness. The repetition of characters becomes a representation of a specific gesture or emotion creating larger symbols and metaphors, ultimately becoming its own language.”  

For more information about Kasumi and her work, go to kasumifilms.com.