Samantha Jones
Conjured, 2011, 72 x 72 inches
Staging shot, thesis installation
Aritst Statement
I am interested in encountering that which lies beyond the rational, existing between an Arcadian nostalgia for the past, and Utopian ideals of the future. In this material age, it is my work with the materials themselves that guides me on a pilgrimage to new worlds, allowing understandings that do not rely on the conceits of the intellect. The work becomes a type of communion, an ecstatic embrace of substance and material, allowing a glimpse of undiscovered realms.
The entheogenic setting of my thesis installation builds tensions between the ruins of a designed, formal landscape, and unchecked, chaotic growth. Artificial materials evoke romantic visions of beauty and order, while they simultaneously dissolve in a sicky-sweet decay of fluid translucency. Grotesque flora and fauna conjure the familiar and the unsettling, expressing natural and numinous forms through an alchemy of the synthetic. My work questions what lies just past the ragged edge of reason and our faltering comprehension of what we believe to be real.
More information available at http://www.samjonesstudio.com