Sam is an artist and weaver currently living and working just outside Detroit, Michigan. She earned her BFA in Fiber in 2016 from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She will graduate this spring with an MFA from the Fiber program at Cranbrook Academy of Art.
Her work focuses on deconstructing and reconstructing her environments through sculptures, drawings, and tapestry weavings. Using contiguous and intersecting outlines and unconventional color combinations she explores how our perceptions and experiences are multifaceted and complex. Any given moment is understood through a combination of our physical senses and our subjective realities. By blurring boundaries between objects and materials she hopes to heighten our understanding of what it means to exist in time and space and the flux between moments of understanding.
Much of her graduate work has centered around a form of self-portraiture using objects and items from her day-to-day life as jumping points for investigation. By translating and reconfiguring these objects into drawings and sculptures she takes seemingly mundane and disparate items and distills them into more homogenized realities. The final works are tapestry weavings whose abstractions and flattening further complicate and dissociate the viewers from the original sources. The textile compositions portray a more subjective and metaphysical realm of feelings and affective experience.
