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Samantha Walrod’s work is influenced by uncanny similarities and differences between two imagined or reconstructed environments. The figurative elements in her recent body of work are loosely constructed from images of the Canadian Wilderness. During her first year in graduate studies, at the University of Alberta she built on a system of mixed media research that will support a thesis exhibition in 2012/2013. With her current paintings, Samantha is investigating her surroundings within a self-reflective narrative and expanding the context of a more general social anxiety of environmental preservation, by examining the art historical tradition of documenting or anticipating catastrophe.
By documenting, rendering and sculpting hexagonal ‘honeycomb’ patterns, Walrod references deep, abstract constructed spaces, presence and absence. The fleeting materiality of the honeycombs’ cast shadow echoes the experience of memory and space. While completing gesture studies in sculpture, photography and painting, her images are increasingly direct in emotional tenor and composition.
At the emotional core of Walrod’s work is a sense of longing and anxiety. Painting has allowed her to construct images of past experiences, which are amplified by her current experience living in Edmonton. In much the same way that Peter Doig responds to his geographic displacement between his home in Trinidad and his history living in Canada and the U.K., Walrod Seeks to continue to document the slippage between the real, remembered and imagined. These works reference ephemeral qualities and moods witnessed during a recent trip to the Queen Charlotte Islands and the imagined mood of historical Japan.
This body of work resituates the narrative of the Canadian wilderness as promise of possibility and progress to a mythology of possible ruin and fragility. Figurative works looks inward and reflect emotions of the artist and her peers living in this contemporary social climate. Landscape paintings look outward; they depict a space for escape from the everyday, while simultaneously hinting at imperfect future.
