SAMANTHA KRUKOWSKI
JUNE 7 - 28, 2024 | SNAP SPACE GALLERY
SAMANTHA KRUKOWSKI
Samantha Krukowski is an artist, builder, author and educator. Trained as an architect and art historian, she engages an interdisciplinary and intermodal practice that explores the nature of images and objects, the records of experience, the identity of place and the consequences of intervention. Her first book, Playa Dust: Collected Stories from Burning Man (Black Dog Press, 2014) was a compilation of untold tales about the event and impermanent city that appear and disappear annually in the Nevada desert. Her most recent book, T-Squared: Theories and Tactics in Architecture and Design (Intellect Books, 2022) illuminates the extensive and explicit relationship between the research that shapes art, architecture, and design practices and the studio prompts and assignments that are developed by faculty for students engaging the creative disciplines. It also demonstrates that pedagogical inquiry and invention can be a (radical) research endeavor that can become an evolutionary agent for faculty, students, institutions, and communities. From 2019-20, she worked to renovate an unusual derelict property in Northside, a tightly gridded Cincinnati neighborhood. This property, with three buildings situated on 1/3 acre, was once the site of the Brazel Novelty Company. Discoveries during the renovation included mummified possums, commies (Civil War clay marbles, so named because they were common), iron jacks and painted porcelain doll heads. The grounds produced ‘yarf’ (yard barf) as landscaping efforts revealed the detritus of careless disposal. This renovation project, nicknamed ‘Ella Jean’, continued Krukowski’s dedication to stabilizing the unstable, cherishing the local and revealing hidden treasures in unattended conditions. Krukowski has an ongoing studio practice and creates drawings, paintings, sculptures, videos and installations. In 2019 she collaborated with students, community members and faculty to create InVasive, a temple for the Cincinnati Art Museum‘s No Spectators: The Art of Burning Man exhibition. She has made a host of experimental videos that have screened at hundreds of national and international film festivals; her drawings, paintings and sculptural works have been exhibited nationally and internationally. She is a faculty member in the Painting Department at the Kansas City Art Institute. Prior to joining KCAI, she was a faculty member at the University of Cincinnati (School of Design), Iowa State University (Department of Architecture), and the University of Texas at Austin (Department of Radio-Television-Film). She has been working in higher education for 20+ years and has taught studios, seminars and lecture courses in architecture, art, design, art and architectural history/theory. She has also directed foundations programs for three institutions. She taught the first academic studio course ever taught at Burning Man in 2010. Krukowski received a BA in Political Science at Barnard College/Columbia University (1988), an MA in Art History at Washington University in St. Louis (1992), an MArch (1997) and a Ph.D in Art History (1999) at The University of Texas at Austin. She has an exceptional daughter, some horses, some dogs, and drives a pickup truck. She attends as many Buck Brannaman clinics as possible, and works with Roby Moreland anytime she can get to Texas. She is also a breast cancer survivor.
Artist Statement
My creative practice is inspired by materials, objects, places and processes that may be invisible because they are considered common or viewed as refuse; because they are impermanent or transitory; because they require magnification to be seen; because they have been abandoned by people or bypassed by cultural designations of importance and value.
Since moving to Kansas City in 2020, my work has evolved to engage baling wire, twine, saddle leather, and ideas of vastness drawn from the nearby prairie. The Tangle Series includes objects and images that begin with a singular line, and end in dimensional knots and tangles. The difficulty of making sense of the world is epitomized in these works that are visually and spatially complex, sometimes unreadable, but that are forced by gravity and materiality to have a structural logic nonetheless. Intuitively built and responsive to the character of materials found in agricultural and livestock settings, The Tangle Series will expand to include images that reference these built objects in various conditions of illumination.
Previous work has included drawings, paintings, video, installation, renovation and construction. The Microscopy Series was a collection of drawings that referenced imagery found in histology and electron microscopy. Drawn using technical pen on mylar, they were investigations of the visual and spatial languages of corporeal systems. I represented distinct taxonomies, but also looked for similarities and reoccurrences of form. The drawings were architectonic and anatomical landscapes. More playful drawings called Histo-Grams were based on histological slides; they were brightly colored, illustrative and cartoon-like bits of bodies. They were intentionally small and square, recalling the view through an analog microscope – that of a slide specimen covered by a thin square glass plate. One painting series focused on water reflections. The works countered the constant shifting surfaces created by the play of light on water, substituting a complex materiality for an ephemeral, though briefly marked, transparency. Most of the video work I have done is painterly and abstract. I have transformed eggs into cosmologies, bubbles into buildings. I have collaged the ghosts of images taken from contemporary art and architecture magazines onto clear film leader, finding a contained narrative in an exhaustive and constant stream of history. An ongoing video project is a timepiece that registers and records the transformations of the space between sea and sky on the Newfoundland horizon.
From 2019-2020, my partner and I worked to renovate an unusual derelict property in Northside, a tightly gridded Cincinnati neighborhood. This property, with three buildings situated on 1/3 acre, was once the site of the Brazel Novelty Company. Discoveries during the renovation included mummified possums, commies (Civil War clay marbles, so named because they were common), iron jacks and painted porcelain doll heads. The grounds produced ‘yarf’ (yard barf) as landscaping efforts revealed the detritus of careless disposal. This renovation project, nicknamed ‘Ella Jean’, continued my dedication to stabilizing the unstable, cherishing the local and revealing hidden treasures in unattended conditions.