Samantha Mack

Samantha Mack

sdmack@andrew.cmu.edu

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Samantha Mack is a Pittsburgh-based artist and recent graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, where she earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a minor in Professional Writing. With a background in painting and poetry, Samantha is interested in the poetics of image, form, symbol, and material: in works that evoke thought and emotion through abstract visual storytelling. 

While maintaining a deep fondness for her two-dimensional roots in painting, collage, and text, the artist has developed a fascination with how the literary can become sculptural; how a book, poem, or poetic experience can become multi-dimensional or interactive. 

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Artist Statement: 2018

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I create portals and channels for emotion. Personal experience is translated into physical form, yielding metaphors for internal and external states of mourning, nostalgia, introspection, and identity. For each translation, I choose specific media, working in two or three dimensions. Material and process matter, both conceptually and expressively. Threads connect, spillage releases, and stains leave traces. The works are both personal and interpersonal, exploring individual identity, memory, and loss, often in relation to the familial sphere, and occasionally inviting interaction. Recent works honor family members, both living and deceased, through a blending of their artistic expressions with my own. Some of my paintings investigate travel to unvisited spaces, both real and imagined, as a means of escape. They provide emotional breathing space. In this way, process-based emotive abstraction blends with more literal investigations of myself and the ones I love, striking a shared chord of experience and empathy.

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