“Tattoo”     50″ x 52 “    oil on linen

“Bluejay, Flicker and Guardian”     16″ x 20 “    oil on linen

“Ivy”     60″ x 72 “    oil on linen    2007

“Overlook”     28″ x 48 “    oil on linen

Artist Statement
I have always been awed and inspired by the mystery and amorality of nature. My paintings deal with carefully selected subjects from my observations, visions, and experiences with the natural world. In the most recent decade, creatures living and dead, have entered into my images. Birds, butterflies, insects, and mammals have become part of the scenes that haunt my thoughts. I investigate the kinship between my envisioned nature and it’s inhabitants and their physical and spiritual machinations and intrigues. I see the natural world filled with both unconscious and symbolic rituals and phenomena. My paintings are meant to give insight into this often unseen world. Creatures become a liaison between our natural world and our human world and imply a kinship to human experience.

Website
http://www.HollySears.com

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A new Bob Dylan video features photographs from Bruce Davidson’s 1959 “Brooklyn Gang” series to illustrate the song.  In the spring of 1959, Davidson met a group of Brooklyn teens called “The Jokers”.  That summer, he photographed the entire gang in their natural habitat, from hanging out late at night on the street corner to taking a  Coney Island beach trip with their girlfriends.   The “Beyond Here Lies Nothin’” video will appear exclusively on Amazon’s homepage until Wednesday, April 22, in the Bob Dylan Store for 30 days thereafter.

The complete series is on the Magnum website.

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Artist Statement
My own work is largely concerned with the meaning and existence of the self in today’s unstable, fragmented world, specifically how the individual is able to reconcile the external and internal forces that cause us to function in different, often contradictory, roles. Performative in essence, frequently employing role play and adopting multiple or different personas, my work not only reconstructs and documents other’s lives, but regularly becomes an intense examination of my own. The photographs in my latest body of work are an exploration of my own private experience with love and intimacy. Derived from what began as collaboration with my romantic partner, Michael, the work is an embodiment of my own subconscious forces at work, mixed with real events.

More specifically, the work chronicles the obsessive nature of our romantic relationship, and its overwhelming effect on my life, visually attempting to eliminate the distinction between dreams and reality, reason and madness, and objectivity and subjectivity by merging everyday occurrences with psychological aberrations. Fragmented, the events it depicts are not literal but figurative illustrations of a unique psychological state resulting from the self-reflexive nature of our relationship and the psychological breakdown between oppositional forces that comes with love; the internal and external, the self and the other, presence and absence and lucidity and blindness.

Website
http://www.haleyjsamuelson.com/

Upcoming Exhibit
Opening reception June 25th at Hous Projects gallery in Soho,  from 6-8

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