Samantha Nye
Bio: b. Hollywood, Florida sometime in the 1980s
Samantha Nye is a painter, video, and installation artist living in Philadelphia. For the first decade of her life, she was a relatively unsuccessful child model. At five years old she remembers her mother driving her to South Beach casting offices as she energetically rehearsed the line, “Hello, my name is Samantha Nye, and I’m 7 years old... This is my right profile...” She often performed seven. She learned early about performance, identity, and class aspiration. Her work reframes seduction through reenactments of 1960s pop culture. Her paintings, videos, and installations highlight aging bodies, celebrate queer kinship, and facilitate an intergenerational dialogue about sexuality, leisure, and pleasure.
Samantha is currently preparing for a solo show at the Candice Madey Gallery in New York City and a video installation project in Utrecht. Her recent solo show, My Heart’s In A Whirl at The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston was written about in The Boston Globe, BOMB Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, and Boston Art Review. She has a painting in the collection of The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston which is currently on display in the group show, New Light: Encounters and Connections.
Thesis Exhibition
Artist Statement: Reenactment has long been a theme in my practice which centers around a performative relationship between my mother and myself. My current body of work includes a series of paintings that reimagine “aspirational lifestyle imagery” from the 1960s alongside a series of music videos that remake Scopitone films from the same era. These pop-cultural references are chosen as symbols of the dominant sexual and cultural consciousness of my mother’s adolescence. I have also regularly cast a group of women, ages 55-92, related to me either through blood or life-long friend circles of my mother and grandmother. With this, my reenactments aim to retroactively influence the models of sexuality that influenced the generations of women before me, from whom I inherited notions of gender and methods of seduction.
What started as queer role play amongst extended family has grown to include queer elders, bound by the concept of chosen family. Both my paintings and videos are meant as love letters to queer spaces past and present, the thriving and the abandoned. In my attempt to image queer kinship I acknowledge the beautiful parts, the prickly parts, the radical parts and the parts that have long needed fixing. With celebration and criticality I pull references from lesbian legacies and failures. These works envision a fantasy history of both age and trans-inclusive lesbian spaces and mash-up incongruent queer references such as Slim Aarons photographs of the 1960s, lesbian separatist spaces of the 1970s, Bat Mitzvah parties from 1990s, and the Miami club scene of the early 2000’s.
L to R: Daddy (3:01 min, 4K Video, 2017); Silencer (3:10 min, HD Video, 2015); Calendar Girl (4:10 min, HD Video, 2014)