| Justin Samson’s sculptures are eerily familiar—they remind me of the strange Native American sculptures I stumbled upon as a child, bewildered, in my aunt’s backyard. Detailed and colorful, his sculptures take the form of totems, or mysterious, boxy beings covered with tassels, strung with beads, and patterned with fur and textiles. The landscape that these creatures inhabit is fully furnished with equally resplendent wall and floor ornaments including silk-screened wallpaper and embroidered pedestals. The resulting vista is a wild collage in both process and aesthetic: it is science fiction meets hippy den, Minimalism versus indigenous craft. |
|
Justin Samson’s sculptures are eerily familiar—they remind me of the strange Native American sculptures I stumbled upon as a child, bewildered, in my aunt’s backyard. Detailed and colorful, his sculptures take the form of totems, or mysterious, boxy beings covered with tassels, strung with beads, and patterned with fur and textiles. The landscape that these creatures inhabit is fully furnished with equally resplendent wall and floor ornaments including silk-screened wallpaper and embroidered pedestals. The resulting vista is a wild collage in both process and aesthetic: it is science fiction meets hippy den, Minimalism versus indigenous craft. And though the result is a creature of its own, most of the decorative elements that make up the sculptures are thrift-store finds from a broad variety of specific eras and styles. In the wallpapers alone there are elements of art nouveau, psychedelia, and 80s decorative décor. Like any fantastically strange object found on the street, these sculptures captivate viewers with a mixture of surprise and humor.
In an untitled piece from 2006, two anthropomorphic figures stand awkwardly behind what looks like their child, a slumped ball with dangly little legs sitting on a pillow in a miniature teepee. The standing figures are two-dimensional pillars of bric-a-brac: a collage of cultural appropriations mutated into some kind of childhood fantasy, where blankets become capes and beads form the arms of wizards. However, Samson’s layering of decorative materials adds up to something quite more than what he started with: they read like icons of a long record of past styles, transfigured and filtered through his personal memory.
Born in 1979, the work speaks to his upbringing as a young man who grew up in the 80s, surrounded by the varied influences of pop culture and underground art. Samson came of age in Providence, Rhode Island, a place well known for its strong underground art scene, spearheaded by members of the art collective Forcefield and their friends, including Jim Drain, Ara Peterson, Matt Brinkman, and others. These artists have been bringing a psychedelic jolt to Chelsea for the past few years, employing a similar cut-and-paste-on-acid approach. Samson’s work emplous an aesthetic that recycles the random consumer debris that fills our culture, leaving the viewer mesmerized by the eclectic American artistic experience.
