Samantha Bares
Printmaking
Samantha Bares grew up in Nederland, Texas. Her artist father got her interested in art at a young age, and her mother encouraged this practice all throughout her life. After receiving her BFA in printmaking from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in 2018, Samantha is now pursuing a graduate degree with a concentration in printmaking at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the SGCI Print Archives, the University of Utah’s Art Department Collection, the Jerry Crail Johnson’s Earth Sciences and Map Library at Ƶ Boulder, and the Museum of Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas.
My work brings in fragments of imagery from my own lived experience, the experiences of my family, dreams, and folklore to construct representational narratives. I am interested in constructing environments that contain a complex amalgamation of emotions brought on by the actions of the figures that inhabit it.
My thesis seeks to communicate stories that I am familiar with using the language of storytelling. The narratives that occupy each of the works range from being invented to reinvented, while also being implied. The main environment I have chosen to serve as a source of imagery to build my scenes upon is that of the annual carnival-like celebration, The Nederland Heritage Festival, located in my hometown of Nederland, Texas. It is upon these fairgrounds that I explore what makes up the heritage of where I come from, while also considering the characteristics that people attribute to categories like industry, gender, ethnicity, religion, and mental illness. In conjunction with utilizing the concept of folk and fairy tales to anchor my own personal mythos, the body of work was given a solid foundation so that I was efficiently able to communicate the constructed culture within South East Texas and within myself.
Image: "Navigating Fortune Through the Previous Generation," 2020. Black pencil drawings on paper. 8” x 11”
Thesis Artwork
