SAMUEL STAFFAN: IMAGINED HISTORY

Antraniq Gallery, NYC, Curated by Monica King

September 24 - 26, 2022

Imagined History features new paintings and photography-based works exploring themes surrounding process, nature, place, time, and memory. The artist Samuel Staffan was raised in rural Northern Michigan and the works reflect the values of that landscape in its tranquility, silence, and severity.

Staffan approaches the studio practice like an ecosystem, creating a number of different processes that interact with each other, leading to unexpected and discovered results. Starting from painting, Staffan uses a self-developed process of preparing and painting on paper which involves embracing the fluidity of water, building texture, referencing photos taken in nature, and imbuing the papers with their own history. This process aims to replicate the cycle of growth and decay in nature, giving the work the feeling of being ‘of’ nature rather than ‘about’ nature. The works are often painted on much larger sheets of paper and then cropped down to their smaller sizes, in a search for the best moments that arise from these processes. Each layer is also extensively photographed, which both preserves layers that are no longer visible, and builds a library of the moments to be used in the artist’s photography works. The way people continually invent and then reconstruct their own histories, by building layer upon layer of memories and moments, is mirrored in these complex processes. The abstractions that stem from these layered memories, both real and imagined, aim to paint a fuller picture of what it means to be human, by exploring how we relate to nature, time, and memory, and how we imagine our own histories.

Image: Installation View, Samuel Staffan: Imagined History

Installation photography by Monica King