Samantha Rees

Reflecting a depiction of a parallel reality, my artistic practice synthesizes the non-fictional and the fictional. I make drawings, installations, sculpture, and videos, using each medium to explore the tensions and boundaries between fantasy and reality. I use drawing in particular to depict worlds with an ambiguous temporality; worlds that could exist in the past, present, or future. Thematically, my works focus unmistakably on nature and architecture—I find the anxious tension between the two to be both fascinating and melancholic at the same time. I am drawn to ruins, abandoned structures, and social housing, as each of these forms has its unique relationship to nature and human life, yet what they share is the capacity to be an economic reminder of a greater narrative. Abandoned buildings, for example, may be viewed as disturbances to the natural order or as eyesores in metropolitan areas. Structures that are in ruin or have lost their historical relevance can be seen as a momentary break in the capitalist system. I am curious about what these structures reveal about time. How will they appear in the distant future, and how did they appear in the past? How will they appear when the natural world has taken over, when it becomes difficult to distinguish between buildings and wild areas? Will these ruins symbolise a vanished civilisation from the past? Semi-permanent in their state of decay, ruins change far more slowly than our memories do; memory erodes quickly, and continually, while ruins can degrade over vast expanses of time. The past is emphasised by such slow ruin. Many urban landscapes have been forgotten over time, and many more will be forgotten in the future. We don't have to travel very far into history to find examples of human-made landscapes that have become obsolete. We are living in a period of social, economic, and environmental upheaval, and there are clues all around us that our entire way of life is very realistically becoming something of the past. As an artist, I reflect on the past, recognising its intricacies and maladies, through the work I make in the present, in the highly precarious circumstances of today, which in turn creates a mark on the future. Mainstream art in the West at least has historically been concerned with shock, breaching taboos, and gaining attention. This has been so normalised that it is now common to argue that in these ironic, tired, post-everything times, there are no more taboos to violate.