sam vernon

Sam Vernon graduated from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 2009 with an award for Excellence in Drawing. Spanning a range of media, Vernon employs drawing, painting, photography and printmaking to pay homage to the past and revise the traditional ghost story, addressing questions of postcoloniality, racialization, sexuality, and historical memory. 


Vernon is a 2010-11 A.I.R. Emerging Artist Fellow and recipient of the A.I.R. Emma Bee Bernstein Fellowship. Her first solo exhibition, Think On It—Then Lay It Down For Good was recently on view at A.I.R. Gallery March 29 - April 24, 2011. Last year Vernon was selected to execute a large-scale mural by the City of New York's Department of Transportation to be installed under the Brooklyn Bridge in DUMBO, Brooklyn this summer. This spring she curated a Recent Graduate Exhibition Booth at the Affordable Art Fair, May 4-8, 2011.

Her work will be on view this year in three upcoming group exhibitions at The Wassaic Project, Skylight Gallery, and Lesley Heller Workspace. Vernon currently lives and works in Brooklyn.

artist statement

 

Images derived out of historical fiction. A congregation of bodies dancing, sleeping, and weeping haunt my dreams. Clusters and mounds of images resembling a dark cloud form a cheerful celebration of suffering. Female figures struggle and fight the elements in dust, sandstorms, wind, and water. Leaves of willow trees swaying, rivers, forests, fields, and the spirit of a monochromatic, archetypal southern landscape. Ghosts represent unknown ancestors in symbolic form and quilt-like patterns collapse into lines and chaos.

 

The drawings are transformed through a Xerox process and the multiples are re-configured into new collages. By means of the machine, lines are re-interpreted as the blackest-black against the whitest-white of the page. Text-inspired polar opposition illustrates poverty and privilege, womanhood and sexism, blackness and white supremacy. The aesthetic yields to the subject.

 

Then, I had a dream. A dark throng, a cave-like mass, made out of the drawings: paper architecture. How Ghosts Sleep, the installation materialized. Fear, anxiety and memory translated on flapping sheets. Ghosts congeal and bodies form in dark corners and hang about whispering until the inflection of their voices can be heard among the living.