Korean born artist Samantha Wall’s black and white works explore the complexities of race, particularly her own multi-raciality’ between living in Korea and now the United States. First featured on our blog, Wall primarily works in graphite and charcoal to create detailed and conceptual drawings. For her upcoming exhibit at Roq la Rue gallery in Seattle, “Let Your Eyes Adjust to the Dark”, Wall created new works using sumi ink and dried pigments to achieve a haunting style of expressionism. Her subjects’ figures are reduced to ghostly silhouettes and ink blot-like impressions, where the only detail is in their eyes and facial expressions. Dappled by the ink medium, they are neither black nor white but a complicated combination of both. In an effort to better understand her subjects, Wall interviewed and then photographed the multiracial women that are portrayed in her drawings. She approached her 2013 “Indivisible” series in similar fashion, where Wall made photographs and video stills during extensive interviews with her subjects. The result is more than a conventional portrait; they are “a place where emotions call out and perceived racial boundaries dissolve,” Wall says.
“Let Your Eyes Adjust to the Dark” by Samantha Wall opens at Roa la Rue gallery on October 1st, and will be on view through October 31st, 2015.
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