Samantha Tai Wood is a mixed media artist in New York City. Her work translates into visual form the tension between reveling in a solitary moment and exploring the interconnectedness of the human experience. Her preoccupation with confronting the limitations inherent in methods of human connection leads to work that honors this predicament through specificity of medium without losing sight of the viewer's placement within the exchange or the visibility of the artist's hand creating the piece.
Growing up as a biracial woman, Samantha could almost see the barriers between herself and the antagonistic communities around her. This, coupled with a predilection for solitude, engendered a general sense detachment and an awareness of the silent exchange of effort required to bridge the distance. Her mixed-media paintings and drawings distill this ephemeral exchange into tangible, more clarified, intimate reenactments that leave room for silent reflection on one’s relationship to the work and, as a result, one’s relationship to others.
The space between the viewer and the artwork is as considered as the artist's hand within the artwork, the size of the piece, and the ripples within the paper under the paint. Her work utilizes the juxtaposition of texture and value to highlight the potential and weight of what is not shown. This consideration of absence and silence is carried into her playful manifestation of the potential, or expected, beauty embedded within the human forms, here created with detailed line work that more readily displays its abstraction or deterioration. Through the tangible revelation of tensions that distort connections amongst (and within) people, her work seeks to overcome this detachment, orchestrating in its wake a true, shared experience between the work, the viewers, and herself.
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Photo: Jerald Watson