Samantha Rosenwald
E: When did you first get interested in art ? What was your training like?
S: I have always been interested in art, since as long as I can remember. I had this little plastic work desk I would sit at and draw. I was always drawing. I had an after-school art teacher in elementary and middle school, but my first real institutional art education started in grad school. In undergrad, at Vassar, there were strict distribution requirements and, because I was an art history major, I had to take a bunch of courses in art history, so the rest of my classes had to be outside of the arts. Once I went to CCA for grad school, I was finally able to focus all of my attention on art. (Though I felt super behind all of the kids coming in from art undergrad programs haha)
Can you tell me a little about your process?
Sure! My process took a lot of trial and error to get right because colored pencil typically doesn’t want to stick to gessoed canvas. I start by putting on a bunch of coats of gesso and wet sanding in between each layer. Then I add a few layers of a more pours, less plasticy, medium so the colored pencil can absorb into the surface. Because I’m super anal and organized, I almost always have a specific sketch of my ideas. Sometimes, if the canvas is really big, I’ll project my sketch onto the canvas so I get the composition laid out just as I planned it. Then I just color!
Who would you say are your biggest artistic influences?
Hmmm, I know this sounds kind of basic, but Matisse is a huge influence for me. The way he works with color and form is so inspiring. And the way he lets his unique hand interfere with reality I find very influential. I also love Julie Curtiss, Genesis Belanger, Louise Bonnet, Julia Wachtel, Artemisia Gentileschi, and Florine Stettheimer.
I really enjoy your visual through lines from ceramic to your works on paper and canvas and I appreciate that there’s a consistent visual language and style here. Does working in different mediums impact the way you think about your work?
Oh for sure. I’m definitely a firm believer in “the medium is the message” so I find that shifting from medium to medium, either consciously or subconsciously, informs whatever I’m making. When I’m working in sculpture, for example, I’m thinking about the traditional applications of sculpture throughout the canon of art history; I’m thinking about Roman Republican bust portraits or equestrian portraits, and that characteristically male display of power definitely infiltrates the work. And same for works on canvas or works on paper — every different medium has its own set of connotations and I think it’s interesting to acknowledge that and let it seep into the work.
Do you think that the colored pencil has anything to do with control?
Oh my god, absolutely. Colored pencil is interesting to me because it has such a fine and specific tip to it. Unlike painting with a brush which can be a little more free, there is something so manic and meticulous about pencils and I think that rhymes so well with the anxious and frantic and obsessed nature of my work.
Your more recent work seems to draw on the traditions of Dutch still life – could you tell me a little more about the art historical influences of your work?
Yeah! I was an art history major in college so I feel like I naturally gravitate to ‘the canon,’ especially as a means of showcasing the heavily male-centric and exclusionary reality of the whole world. I like to take highly revered works or techniques and imitate them and mock them at the same time, sort of to critique from within.
You’ve said your work is meant to explore modern womanhood, which I also think is interesting because some of the most impressive Dutch still lives were painted by women. How would you say your work shows off the modern woman and how does femininity play a role in your pieces?
The female, in the history of art or the history of philosophy and even today is regulated and dictated by her surroundings. She seems to always be put in the role of the object instead of the autonomous subject. And all of that is super apparent when you look at works by the great male art masters, using objects like a fleetingly beautiful flower or a ripe fruit to represent the female — she’s only worth her beauty and her fertility when she’s young, and when she’s old, forget about it. I like to borrow these kinds of Dutch still life motifs and mix them with contemporary references to femininity as sort of a mocking ‘fuck you’ and also as a way to flesh out the female experience.
Femininity is more than just conceptual. How does the hand play in your work?
I’d say my work has a definite female look to it. I’m not really sure what a female hand looks like, but I can recognize that my work has it. It’s like handwriting: a lot of the time, you can tell if a male or a female wrote something by the way they wrote it. It’s this weird magical ineffable quality, I guess. Also, I like to make soft, puffy, globular forms in my work. I think that puffed-up three-dimensionality has a similar female association to it too.
Many of the objects you’ve included in your drawings, paintings, and sculptures possesses a high/brow lowbrow quality (PABST, Gucci, Tecate) What made you pick the use of certain objects to include in your work over others, and why those specific brands?
I like to choose objects that have a vast memetic quality to them — objects that people can look at and immediately think of a plethora of contexts and associations with. Like the Tecate can for example is really relatable to mundane millennial reality. So if I put a Tecate can next to a sliced up naked female body, the Tecate can becomes the straight actor and the chopped up lady is the character actress. The beer can normalize a reality in which a massacred lady is lying on a picnic table. Gucci shoes, on the other hand, have a more aspirational quality to them. They would be more interesting in a Dutch still-life setting: I want to achieve a lifestyle that entails fancy shoes just like I want to achieve the technical mastery of the Dutch still-life genre. When the objects I choose can inspire layers of meaning, beyond the meanings that even I
I have in mind, I think the piece itself is way more generative and successful.
How do you think brands and brand identity lend themselves to the patriarchal idea that women can “have it all?”
Well, brand names are these shiny, sexy beacons of hope. They flirt with the consumer and promise this amazing new life if you just buy the product. They make people feel like if you just buy this one thing, you will be the woman you’ve always dreamed of being. I guess that’s the basis of consumerism. I like to incorporate specific branding in my work because they each have such a unique projection of how one’s reality could be, and it’s interesting to me to get into that alternate reality space and play around with the connotations of these luxury goods.
It’s interesting that many artists including yourself and women like Didi Rojas have turned to luxury brands to comment on a distinctly millennial (and often female) experience. How do you feel about this comment on consumption and capitalism as someone who is creating works to be consumed?
Oof, yeah, it’s a complicated and sensitive line to teeter on. The consumption or business side is definitely the nefarious underbelly to the beast that is the art world. This is why, personally, I find political art problematic. To me, making an art piece about world atrocities and then selling that piece for something like 50k just seems like such a slap in the face to the people whose misfortune you’re benefiting from. It can be such a fine line between ethical commentary and gross fetishization and commodification of human suffering. I stick to subject matter that is about me and my experience to help toe this line. Someone once asked me why I never depict people of color in my work and honestly, it’s just because that would be wrong of me. I would never try to comment on the experiences of a Black woman or a Native woman or a Latina woman because that’s not my place, I don’t have those first-hand experiences, and if I made a profit from that, it would be fetishizing and inappropriate. I think it’s important to keep the implications of selling one of your paintings in mind when you’re making it, even though that’s hard. I would hate to make money from an experience that isn’t my own.
How do you use humor in your work? I feel like using humor is so true to your experience as both a woman and a Jewish person.
Oh yeah, I think the intersection of humor and femininity is so fascinating. I’ve always been the comedian in my life, I love making people laugh, and at a certain point, people started looking to me for comic relief. That feeling like I’m performing comedy at the whim of my peers connects with the expectation that as women, we’re here to please, to appease, or to perform some sort of labor. Femininity is extremely performative in the way women are taught to behave, and, sometimes, in these surreal moments of either delusion or clarity, it feels like I’m an actor playing the role of myself in a play starring somebody else.
The female body also is featured heavily in your works, although in more recent works the female form has been bifurcated and altered and is often without the head entirely. How did you make this progression from including female heads to omitting them and why?
Hmm, I’m not exactly sure how that change came to be, but I definitely think there’s something more interesting and curious about a woman with missing limbs, especially a missing head. The face is where the identity lives. You can get to know a person through the depth in their eyes, the personality in their expressions. But when you compositionally deny a woman a head, you’re denying her the right to be a personality, to have an identity. She becomes an object. I like to mimic in my work the ways men essentialize and objectify the female body as a way of reciprocating the male gaze via disidentification. And by framing the woman from neck to waist, I’m able to create this underlying feeling of violence without showing the gore of an actual beheading. It’s more of a quiet unsettling feeling that takes a little longer to unpack.
Who are three artists you’re raving about right now?
I’ve been loving the work of Adam Amram. His work has such a beautiful material quality and portrays sort of horrific or sad scenes but in a comic vernacular (and I can relate). I also love Adam Alessi’s work. He’s based in the bay area, I believe, and has been doing some incredible things with these haunted and somehow also funny anamorphic paintings. And Katelyn Ledford is amazing. She combines hyperrealism with sort of a post-digital Photoshop-esque aesthetic and they’re just absolutely masterful.
What is your favorite piece [of yours]?
I think currently, my favorite piece of mine is one I just finished. It’s called Bait and it shows a violently severed veiny penis hanging from a fish hook.