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
