Sampler | Samantha Donnelly

About

Join us for the opening night Friday 04 April 2014. Sampler showcases new and existing sculptural work that weaves together imagery and found objects to form a landscape of dislocated and interrupted representations. The exhibition encompasses a series of new large scale collages positioned throughout the domestic architecture of the gallery space, quoting from textiles, such as needlecraft samplers. They are draped over beams, hang free from the wall and lie on the gallery floor. Each new transformation creates fantastical shapes and forms that add to the confusion and saturation of the work. Bringing together paper images clipped from magazines, drawings from advertisements, personal travel mementoes and staged photographs made in Donnelly's studio, the work is overrun with repeated and interrupted samples of imagery. Placed alongside the works are a scattering of found objects that mimic the images represented in the collages. Often fake, such as synthetic hair extensions, these objects dramatise a tension between nostalgia, the relic-like and the throwaway culture of modern consumerism. All of the work has correspondences to real or desired spaces, evoked through alluring or enticing imagery. This creates a dream-like space within the gallery as glimpses of the real, remembered and imagined coalesce.