KEVIN MOORE

Edra Soto (b. 1971, Puerto Rico) alters and recontextualizes common functional objects—wrought-iron screens, plastic lawn furniture, and electric fans, ubiquitous in her native Puerto Rico—to create objects and environments that celebrate the voices of working-class communities. Soto’s installation, the place of dwelling, is commissioned for Kemper Museum’s tenth annual Atrium Project and is a direct response to the original 1994 Gunnar Birkerts architecture. Addressing the tabernacle-like center atrium, Soto’s installation invests the space with personal memories of her Catholic upbringing, a gesture that both questions methods of colonial indoctrination and celebrates sacred sites filled with signs and symbols offering guidance and direction. By infusing elements of vernacular design with sacred symbolism, Soto proposes a correlation between art museums and churches as similarly charged spaces for the discovery of higher meaning.