| Montana based artist Terry Karson brings a collection of 39 "Fragments" to San Antonio’s Sala Diaz. A series began shortly after a trip to Turkey with his wife in 2004, the compositions are inspired by tiled surfaces of Turkish mosques that directed the artist’s interest toward age-bearing materials and the remnants of an obsolete language. Since then, Karson has made hundreds of small fragments no larger than standard sized trading cards. In the compositions made from the surfaces of cereal boxes and other familiar packaging, Karson slices the cardboard and rearranges those strips into interchangeable vertical units. No matter the arrangement, the composition is always whole, in its original rectangular shape. | 
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Eddie Hayes Jr.
Montana based artist Terry Karson brings a collection of 39 "Fragments" to San Antonio’s Sala Diaz. A series began shortly after a trip to Turkey with his wife in 2004, the compositions are inspired by tiled surfaces of Turkish mosques that directed the artist’s interest toward age-bearing materials and the remnants of an obsolete language. Since then, Karson has made hundreds of small fragments no larger than standard sized trading cards.
In the compositions made from the surfaces of cereal boxes and other familiar packaging, Karson slices the cardboard and rearranges those strips into interchangeable vertical units. No matter the arrangement, the composition is always whole, in its original rectangular shape. Through a process of shuffling the strips horizontally, the text on the cardboard surface (in most cases a brand name) is reordered beyond recognition. Specific units of what was once part of a cake mix box, its nutritional facts, or its list of ingredients is scrambled, leaving an illegible and faint essence of what those texts used to represent. Such is the case in Turkey, with the remnants of the Arabic language mutely lingering and fading in obsolescence on Istanbul’s interiors and facades.
In Fragment #18, the resemblance of a Velveeta cheese carton emerges from hints of the brand’s yellow, blue, and red color harmony. "Velveeta" cannot be read but the dimensions of the long rectangular box seem to give it away. Others surfaces such as Fragment #86 are so obliterated that playing "name that brand" is pointless. The subtlest work in the exhibition, Fragment #86, stands apart as an exercise in seeing different shades of white. Much like a Robert Ryman, only in less than nine square inches, attention is drawn to the qualities of neutral whites. Sandpapered layers reveal glossy, matte, and yellowing varieties of white sitting on a standard white background beneath a creamy white archival matt. Layers of paper quality overlap, budge, and draw attention to their shadows and crevices.
Fragment #12 presents a chromatic ambiguity. Is this bubble gum pink? Barbie pink? Detergent box pink? More importantly, the colors—in this case pink and dashes of blue—enjoy a state of meaninglessness. Being indiscernible is almost like being invisible. The difference is that although the cardboard fragments can no longer carry out their message, they are chromatically, as Felix Gonzalez Torres would have said “contaminated with culture."
Fragment after fragment, the pop-rooted underpinnings of Karson’s riddled signs point to the fuzzy and fibrous edges of distressed cardboard, the thin coat of CMYK inks and the flatness of what were once three dimensional containers in Karson’s pantry. Neither the distortion of the left-to-right order, the sandpapered surface, or the residue of pop colors rid the artwork from our connotations of its materiality. Cardstock has a specific thickness and color. The paints and inks have a particular sheen. Karson exploits the texture and quality of packaging materials by drawing us into a preciously sized fragment of it. The denied logos are self-reflective, revealing its matter and obscuring a language we are all too familiar with.
