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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Closure

Equilibrium

Identity

Rebirth

Severance

Transformation
All works 60 x 60 inches, acrylic on canvas

(NOT) ANOTHER WEDDING IN GOA

I don’t believe that the act of creating artwork can ever be totally isolated from myself–I live in art, transforming my entire world into a channel of creative expression, spanning genres as widely disparate as painting, sculpture, installation, film, performance, and even my own wedding, in search of further tools of artistic communication. Thus, when I dared to become an artist, I was prepared to expose my inner-most spaces to the gaze of my audience.

As an extension of this exercise of baring my private world to the public at large, I have constructed an exhibition around my wedding. I feel that the wedding can be approached from two very different perspectives–it can be understood by its physical presence, its external appearance, or it can be viewed in the light of the internal impact it had on me.

For months after the wedding, the external threatened to overwhelm the internal, which was still too fresh to be expressed. I was still in the process of feeling it! And so even to myself, I presented the wedding as the larger than life experience that it tangibly was. Externally viewed, the wedding was grandeur–the height and power of the synchronized firework display bursting over our heads, the confrontational poses of the village tiger dancers, the exquisite 24-course Tanjore meal. It was the experience of the fashion show created by fashion-designer friends, the entrance and exits of my celebrity collectors, the street carts, cotton candy, tarot card reader, and fortune teller in the hall, and most of all, the fact that the entire wedding had been the largest and most challenging art installation I had ever envisioned.

Before and throughout the wedding, I orchestrated and manipulated all of the four elements I believe make up a piece of artwork: the intent of exploring the meaning of a wedding in my personal and public life, of proving that life is larger than life, of bringing together creative forces from around the world and unleashing them in one space,; the constraints of my canvas of 5,000 odd guests (I obviously had limited control over their actions) and the fact that the wedding was not only about me, but about the legacy of tradition and the wishes of family; the aesthetic elements of my auto and the set I created; and the sounds, sights, tastes, and smells that stimulated the senses.

But now, several months after the fact, I am able to create this exhibition of art in retrospect, to address the internal conflicts that were the backbone of this wedding. And through this exhibition I relive the struggle to find my own balance between tradition and originality, to reconstruct and reevaluate relationships, and to arrive at closure to my grandmother’s death. As these works themselves are a product of the conflict between the conscious and the unconscious, the self and the other, the public and the private, I will not attempt to de-construct them. Rather, I will only say that these works are essentially poetic, exciting pleasure through the rhythmic composition of beautiful, imaginative, and elevated thoughts. And upholding the spirit of today’s obsession with reality television, they once again expose my most private moments, my most intimate battles, and my rawest emotions directly to my audience for their enjoyment and pleasure.

Artist Website
http://www.raghavakk.com

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Up to Our Necks, Oil on Panel, 6×6 inches

From Now On, Oil on Panel, 13×13 inches

Losing It, Oil on Panel, 16×20 inches

Artist Statement
Two years ago, I contsructed a 1:87 scale model neighborhood, a fictitious cluster of eleven houses depicted through model railroading miniatures, styrofoam, cardboard, and plastic, complete with string telephone wires and working lights. The process of designing and assembling the setting over several months triggered my imagination to develop characters to populate the place along with a loose timeline of events that would culminate in the neighborhood’s history. I considered who lived in each home, their family dramas, and the way their private lives might spill into view of their neighbors. The model became a stage on which to develop the psychological implications of belonging to a particular family, with all of its dramas, struggles and familiar routines. I thought: this tree will be taken down after an old man crashes into it; a father will transform this lawn into an ice skating rink; this house will be abandoned after its residents are scandalized on the evening news.

The paintings are glimpses of a scene or fragments of a narrative. Some of the images are conceived of sequentially. While the images don’t necessarily need to be “read” in order, I am interested in storytelling over time through repeated depictions of the same house or car or person, seasonal changes, and shifting vantage points. Like the disturbing difficulty of trying to put rolls of film in order several years after the pictures have been taken, I hope the collective images suggest a known past that is just beyond reach. I intend for the tiny scale to enhance an urge for more information. Similar to a memory, they are fictional constructions of significant moments and distillations of experience. One of my challenges is to invite the viewer to form his or her own connection and narrative so that he may empathize with the occupants’ seemingly mundane existence.

Working with common themes such as transition, aging, isolation, and loss, I am interested in the fragility of relationships and the awkwardness of a group of people trying to coexist and relate to one another. As I transitioned my model into winter, snowbanks of increasing depth seemed to fortify a sense of isolation and quietness. The paintings portray both the magical and suffocating potential of snow, the wonder at its stark beauty and the hopelessness that spring might never come.

Website
http://www.amybennett.com

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