Samantha Thomas’ works are steeped in the canon of painting while actively engaging in multiple disciplines. Her new series of work, entitled Texture/Parameter, marks a continued exploration with the limits of the traditional canvas. Thomas’ exercises in spatial concerns are informed by landscape and our proximity to it. Her art is a means to explore the “place” of the painting, to use the artist’s words. Foreground and background are conceived not by imposing perspective but by building out the materiality of the canvas, occasionally exaggerating core structural components. These assemblage works fit into the scheme of the picture plane that serve as analogies for how the physical and the psychological inform one other as distinct realms of experience. Texture/Parameter builds on a unique approach that seeks the architecture and sculptural form in abstraction.
Archetypal Pattern 2013 acrylic, wool, and thread 80 inches circumference
Landscapification #6 2012-2013 thread on canvas 72 1/2 x 60 x 4 1/2 inches
Texture/Parameter #10 2012 dyed rope on canvas 18 x 15 x 5 inches
Texture/Parameter #1 2012 acrylic, oil and linen over panel 24 x 24 x 5 inches
Texture/Parameter #12 2013 canvas and egg crate over panel on wood 20 1/4 x 20 1/2 inches
Texture/Parameter #20 2013 canvas and oil on linen 18 x 15 inches
.Texture/Parameter #21 2013 burlap, thread, canvas, and spray paint on linen 28 x 20 inches
Texture/Parameter #22 2013 acrylic, oil, and burlap on linen 20 x 15 inches
Texture/Parameter # 7 2012 linen, thread, and acrylic on canvas 28 x 17 x 8 inches
Texture/Parameter #17 2013 rope, thread, acrylic and oil on canvas 15 x 12 x 3 inches
Texture/Parameter #24 2013 acrylic and oil on linen over panel 18 x 11 x 4 3/4 inches
Texture/Parameter #11 2013 acrylic on linen 14 1/4 x 11 x 4 1/2 inches
Texture/Parameter #15 2013 acrylic, rope, and oil on canvas 11 1/2 x 10 inches
Texture/Parameter #18 2013 thread on canvas 12 x 11 inches
Texture/Parameter #16 2013 acrylic and oil on linen 16 1/2 x 11 x 2 1/2 inches
Texture/Parameter #2 2012 acrylic and oil on burlap 14 x 11 inches
Texture/Parameter #9 2012 rope, thread, and oil on linen 12 1/4 x 10 inches
Texture/Parameter #3 2012 oil on linen 14 x 11 x 3 inches
Texture/Parameter #5 2012 thread and oil on burlap 12 1/4 x 10 inches
Texture/Parameter #13 2013 thread and burlap on linen 8 x 10 x 1 1/2 inches
Texture/Parameter #19 2013 acrylic, spray paint, thread, and burlap on linen 8 x 10 x 1 1/2 inches
Texture/Parameter #26 2013 acrylic and oil on linen over panel
Texture/Parameter #17 2013 rope, thread, acrylic and oil on canvas 15 x 12 x 3 inches
Texture/Parameter #25 2011-12 thread and burlap
Texture/Parameter #23 2013 thread and linen on board framed 10 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches
Texture/Parameter #6 2012 acrylic and oil on linen 20 x 16 x 8 1/4 inches
Texture/Parameter #4 2012 linen and thread on wool 14 x 11 x 4 inches
Texture/Parameter #8 2012 acrylic and oil on linen 12 x 10 x 6 inches
LANDSCAPIFICATION #1, 2011
66 x 54 inches, Acrylic, oil and enamel on linen over panel
LANDSCAPIFICATION #3, 2012
72 x 60 inches, Acrylic, oil and thread on linen over panel
LANDSCAPIFICATION #4, 2012
60 x 48 inches, Acrylic, oil and charcoal on canvas over panel
LANDSCAPIFICATION #8, 2013
72 x 60 inches, Acrylic, oil, and charcoal on linen over panel
LANDSCAPIFICATION #9, 2013
52 x 48 inches, Dyed linen, thread, acrylic, and spray paint on linen over panel
LANDSCAPIFICATION #10, 2013
75 x 60 inches, Thread, wood, acrylic, and spray paint on linen over panel
LANDSCAPIFICATION #11, 2013
63 x 60 inches, Acrylic, oil, canvas, and burlap over panel
LANDSCAPIFICATION #12, 2013
52 x 43 inches, Acrylic and thread on canvas framed
LANDSCAPIFICATION #13, 2013
60 x 48 inches, Acrylic, thread, oil on canvas and linen over panel
LANDSCAPIFICATION #14, 2013
52 x 43 inches, Thread, acrylic, and oil on linen over panel
Abstract painting's meteoric rise to the sine qua non of modern art history was less linear than erratic, a trajectory aptly charted earlier this year in MoMA's "Inventing Abstraction." If such grand surveys aim to reveal the history of a period by mapping it expansively, Los Angeles - based artist Samantha Thomas mines the canon of abstraction by working intensively, creating canvases that quote from a century-long history of modern art while questioning some its most hallowed assumptions through a sly use of materials.
The works (all 2013) in Thomas's exhibition "Texture/Parameter" were mostly easel-size and installed salon-style on one wall, with two larger pieces nearby. They venture down a path of familiar citations: actual tangled and matted yarn alludes to Pollock's skeins, a tilted frame conjures Mondrian's lozenges, a vertical band pays homage to Newman's zips. The artist's most explicit interlocutor is Kazimir Malevich, whose early 20th-century Suprematist paintings of nearly monochromatic squares--each offset just enough so as not to merely echo the canvases' shape, but rather to exist as an autonomous form--became the stuff of avant-garde legend. Today, the once-austere surfaces of Malevich's squares--especially the famous black ones--are cracking; the deleterious effects of corrosion and decay have qualified the work's promise of truth as embodied in geometry. Thomas intimates as much in two works, each the chromatic inversion of Malevich's black-on-white schema. The raw canvas of Texture/Parameter #12 hides an egg carton, resulting in a bulging, spectral grid. Texture/Parameter #20 is plagued with holes, the result of the canvas having been burned.
While some narratives of abstract art celebrate the purging of figural references in favor of pure line and color, Thomas's work strongly suggests the body in a variety of ways. After all, latent within proposed narratives of abstraction's purely "optical" experimentation was always its shadowy other: the sense of touch. For Thomas, the canvas is far from flat, and materials form an entry point for testing a range of textures. In some pieces, oil and acrylic are built up and smoothed over so as to take on a quality of vinyl or latex. In addition to creating these more synthetic effects, Thomas is persistent in her use of coarse vegetable fibers: burlap, linen, and rope.
Several cruciform reliefs appear wilted and slightly slouching, evoking not universal language of forms, but rather the course of gravity and age. Elsewhere, the canvases seem to sprout appendages. In Texture/Parameter #2, vertical bands of vermillion flank a section of burlap, its raised seam suggesting both the bumpy flesh of scar tissue and the curvature of the human spine. Thomas's vocabulary of orifices and sineway coils, conjuring Eva Hesse and others, invites further bodily associations: a bulky girth of rope becomes entrails, the creasing and wrinkles of linen a protruding navel.
Ambitious in scope, "Texture/Parameter" portended to take on a modernist art history, but it most successfully considers the temporality of a distinctly bodily register: the rhythms of fecundity and rot. Thomas seems to understand that exploring abstraction's parameters is less about interdicting the possibilities of canvas than marshaling its excesses.
----Catherine Damman