Creating symbolic imagery that draws from dreams, memory, and imagination, Sam Black uses painting to process the chaos and randomness of external and internal worlds. Her work explores the unstable terrain between language and image, the places where meaning fractures, mistranslates, or dissolves altogether. Through layered oil painting, Black investigates how images can be recontextualized through the subconscious with a density of intentions that creates a visual/thematical collapse, where multiple and conflicting ideas can exist on the same canvas.
Each painting is built up and scraped back, often going through radical intuitive changes. This results in an obscuring or revealing of a history of gestures, textures, and half-formed figures. Black combines animal and human imagery, drawing from a visual language of myth, occult ritual, and devotional iconography.
