Artist’s Statement

Samelson’s recent works are at once idiosyncratic and deeply engaged with the tradition of abstract painting. These works reflect his interests in emerging form, causation, physics, beauty, love, spirituality, the universe, god(s), cultural isolation, and related issues.

In my daily routine, I think about how buildings and objects hold together. I am curious about how we define structure. Is it solid? Is it rigid? How does the law of entropy impact our concept of destruction? What represents “volatile” and “orderly”? I often imagine blown apart structures becoming reconstituted into a shape that maintains a different kind of structural integrity—one that is solid, but which does not adhere to known physics or the standards of conventional engineering. I also think about the relationship between construction and experience/memory. The idea that architectural style and composition reflects processes of thinking and synthesizing experience drives much of my work. I enjoy coming across examples of rough carpentry in my urban landscape, and thinking about how these constructions function as a diary of the lives of designers, laborers, financiers, etc. Along these lines, entropy functions not only as a law effecting the composition of matter, but also plays a role in restructuring or remixing memories, experience, and our interpretation of certain histories.