March 7th - May 3rd, 2024

About the Artist

   

Bio
Samantha Mack is a multidisciplinary artist whose work in fibers, light, painting, and film
engages with time and repetition in a continual recoding of cycles. Through the medium of crochet in particular — hybridized via image, electricity, and motion — she perpetually reorients to mortality and the infinite through an investigative studio-laboratory practice. Samantha received her B.F.A. in Art with a Minor in Professional Writing from Carnegie Mellon University in 2018, and an M.F.A. in Painting from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2022. Her MFA thesis exhibition, Through a Kaleidoscope, was exhibited in the Main Gallery at Sulfur Studios in 2022. Samantha is a Gallery Assistant and Director of Public Relations at Sulfur Studios, and Production Assistant for IMPACT Arts and Culture Magazine.
www.samanthamackart.com
Instagram: @samanthadmack

Artist Statement
When I was born, my great grandmother Ida crocheted a blanket for me. When she died, she was buried with a pillow I made for her. We come full circle. Like crochet, we work in the round, following each other’s paths, eyes and hands tracing the same small, meditative motions that came before. I pick up the stitch where my great grandmother left off. Through a process of meditative repetition, I work stitch after stitch of delicate crochet, forming it into a chain of lace, a granny square, a thousand butterflies. In my light-based works, this accumulation of detail is diffused through pure light into intricate geometric shadows that shift and dissolve, creating patterns that can only occur through a sheer veil of transparency — a boundary as thin but tangible as the border between life and death. In my paintings, this kaleidoscopic effect is flattened into vibrant layers of pattern and narrative; in my video work, it becomes an infinite loop of composition and decomposition. Through this hybridization of the
generational tradition of crochet with image, electricity and motion, I establish experiential signifiers for the beauty of mortality. There is no machine that can replicate handmade crochet. It calls for and calls back to the biological. It is the single most effective method for modeling hyperbolic geometry, the process
by which cells replicate into ever-expanding layers, folding and curling into kelp, coral reefs, and perhaps, some speculate, the very shape of our universe. It is through this gradual process of overlapping that I come to code and recode, catching my breath only to have it taken away again.