Samantha Krukowski
Region: West
The work I do reflects my interest in analog-digital exchange, non-representational/abstract narratives, the relationships between still and moving images, micro- and macroscopic dimensions, actual and virtual entities.
I am inspired to draw what cannot be seen without technical intervention, to give surface to the apparently surface-less. Currently I am investigating structures of various corporeal systems visible only at conditions of high magnification. Each drawing is a composition of the structural types found in a particular system. I think of these drawings as reconstitutions, reformations, of the body at microscopic levels, and as such they are abnormal, malignant (diseased) corporeal visions. My sources include reproductions of electron microscopy images and original images I create in collaboration with electron microscopists.
Integrating still and moving imagery, my videos utilize camera-less film techniques (direct film practices), analog and digital input, editing and output technologies. The videos are inspired by explorations into substances like thread, salt, glue, eggs, and bubbles, their states and state changes, and the characteristics revealed by attempts to represent them. Microscopic and macroscopic scales, phenomenological points of focus and alchemical transitions | transformations guide the editing process.
My paintings are either large or small, fields for the scale of the body and the eye. The larger paintings are event-spaces, referring to and restructuring the content of recent scientific imaging. They are novel biological landscapes, places of mutation where cell forms from distinct areas of the body are juxtaposed, compared and combined. The smaller paintings-more akin to Petri dishes, dissecting pans, slides-play with the idea that form, content, and media are themselves agents of infection and contamination.