SAMANTHA THOMAS

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Samantha Thomas: Chromoception on view at 4859 Fountain Ave from March 16 through April 27. This is Thomas’ second solo exhibition with the gallery and presents new abstract paintings. An opening reception will take place on Saturday, March 16 from 5 – 7pm.

Chromoception is Thomas’ first solo exhibition since her home and studio burned in the Woolsey Fire in 2018. With no alternative, but to rebuild her life and studio from scratch since then, this exhibition marks a significant breakthrough, a re-emergence of her ever-exploratory and idiosyncratic painting practice. As an artist, Thomas’ work begins with color, shape, texture, line, space, and light, the primary building blocks of painting. Using common studio materials such as raw canvas, thread, and acrylic paint, she embraces their fundamental and distinct qualities to expose their limits and possibilities for expression.

With her newest body of work, Thomas combines techniques of destruction and repair. Cutting away large portions of stretched canvas and reweaving new threads back through, the resulting works are sensuous and textured fiber-abstractions. Line by line, vibrant bands of color form that draw the eye across the canvases. This part of the process is improvisational, guided by her sensitivity to the relationship between neighboring colors. Primarily eschewing blacks and whites in favor of pure color Thomas makes dynamic shifts—both harmonious and unexpected. Ultimately minimal and precise, these are experiments in the potential of color; ruched reflections on the subtleties of shifting light and shadow; and defiantly contest the inherent flatness and regularity of canvas from which they are constructed.

Accenting the prismatic woven-works, Thomas created two monochromatic tondos from her ironically named ‘fleurs’ series. These pieces are formed by gathering the canvas into a circle of undulating folds. They appear supple, delicate, and blossom-like, yet the curving forms are solid and imposing. Spinning like celestial bodies in orbit, they represent light sources cascading luminescence on the woven sedimentary topographies in the exhibition. 

Within psychology and neuroscience, chronoception refers to the subjective experience of perceived time. The exhibition title riffs on this non-objective phenomenon of perception and understanding, but for how we experience color. For Thomas, abstraction is a vehicle to uncover meaning and emotion suspended in color—be it joy, sadness, love, affection, excitement, surprise, boredom, shock, confusion, or the hidden layers of one’s own history.