Samantha DiRosa

www.melancholyobjects.org

Samantha DiRosa's work focuses on the precariousness of memory and history and our societal fixation with documenting and classifying experience. She draws inspiration from institutional and personal collections and speaks to issues of permanence, evidence, and truth, within the context of these collections. Her hybrid media installations unite scientific inquiry with esoteric questions and manifest via the vehicles of book arts, video, sound, sculpture, and photography. Her work has been exhibited widely, and includes solo and group exhibitions at Portland Art Center (Portland, OR), Keki Gallery (Budapest, Hungary), 1078 Gallery (Chico, CA), TIXE Artspace (New York, NY), Manifest Creative Research Gallery (Cincinnati, OH), and Fort Collins Museum of Contemporary Art (Fort Collins, CO).

DiRosa is teaching a video workshop in the summer 2007 Digital Media program at Anderson Ranch Art Center. The class will run from June 11th - 15th.

Mourning Lightness

Mourning Lightness centers around a collection of yellow butterfly carcasses that I amassed from Washington state highways over the last two years. Comprised of photographs, objects and video, the work explores melancholia and sentimentality. The video piece included in Data Poïesis depicts a female figure repetitively plucking wings off the bodies of the butterflies. It is a muse on the childhood game “he loves me, he loves me not”, yet here the carcass takes the place of the flower and its’ wings become the petals. With only four wings on each body, the chant invariably lands on "he loves me not." But the process continues, the futile gesture speaking to rituals surrounding love, loss, and desire.

Mapping Meg Ryan

Mapping Meg Ryan is a video and sound project in the beginning stages of development. A collage of formulaic moments from popular Meg Ryan romantic comedies, this work examines the homogenous narratives and overt happily-ever-after implications that repeat from film to film. Included in Data Poïesis is an excerpt from Gaze Study, an ongoing documentation of every longing gaze that is performed between Meg Ryan and her love interests. The accompanying audio consists of fragments from threshold moments or instances when the protagonists experience conflict or disillusion. Removed from their context, abstracted, then woven back together, the resulting form is a virtual “megscape”. In its totality, the video and sound provides a loop of sorts, where longing, desire, and uncertainty are exposed, but no climax or resolution occurs.