The Samstag Alumni

The 2003 Anne & Gordon Samstag
International Visual Arts Scholarships

Rebecca Ann Hobbs | Anke Kindle | Maria Kontis | John Meade | Callum Morton | Simon Pericich | Samantha Small |

Samantha Small's recent work concerns itself with the making of domestic spaces from cardboard. The artist fabricates the rooms but exhibits only her photographs of them. In Room Temperature (2002) five rooms - Dining, Living, Lounge, Spare and Bedroom - reference the formal aspects of interiors painted by Vermeer. They contain pieces of ordinary floral carpet and patterned wallpaper as well as tiny brooms and cardboard boxes. The scale of the patterns on the wallpaper and carpet give away the illusion of these constructions as much as the corrugated cardboard edges visible at the windows. They suggest rental accommodation and somehow even a dusty smell and unloved aura and yet the light that pours in, always from the left, casts an enthralling warmth within them.

The rooms' ambivalent fragility faces us with a homely/unhomely dichotomy, the uneasiness of cardboard, the hopelessness of their nostalgia. Strangely affecting in their self-sufficiency, the rooms are puzzles, chambers of memories and the desire for manageability and control in an uncertain world

Stephanie Radok
from her Samstag catalogue essay;
The Point of Knowing

• The Samstag Alumni

Room Temperature: Dining Room 2002
C-type photograph on aluminium
110 x 161 cm
© the artist

Room Temperature: Living Room 2002
C-type photograph on aluminium
110 x 161 cm
© the artist