Samantha Stephenson

Bittersweet

8 – 29 July 2023

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“Who do you need?
Who do you love?
When you come Undone”

Duran Duran

“BITTERSWEET”

The word resonates in our ear, confronting and comforting, bringing images of the painful and the profound. Samantha’s two dimensional and three-dimensional works seek to bring such contradictions to the fore and ask the viewer to dwell on the multiple meanings and sensations of a life unravelling and reforming. Meaning becomes not a binary opposition, but finds truth by its opposites, by the traces and margins of what is present and what is excluded, by what has been, what is, and the possibility of what is to come.

Immutable steel bends and twists, becomes malleable and transports us to a serpentine landscape of life, love, and the void. The multiplicity of the moment, a life lived and what is gained and lost along the way appear before us, reminding the viewer of the intangible presence of a world forever escaping them. Ink, acrylic and enamel offer stillness and resolution at first glance, but behind lies a pane that leads to the inchoate darkness of the woods; yet color is never lost and emerges consistently in Samantha’s work to remind the viewer that Zephyr sleeps only for a short season and awakens with hope and the memory of all that is forsaken.

Samantha’s art eschews soliloquy, instead bringing all to a shared communion. Signs coalesce but also invite the viewer to find their own space and interpretation, their own bittersweet experience of the dance. The materials curve and fold in sensuous composition and a khorovod of shared experience and fragments of hope shored against the seas of despair.

Written by Colin Trow