Andra Samelson’s work explores the relationship of microcosm and macrocosm, emptiness and form. The imagery in her paintings is often associated with molecular and galactic systems. Rendering forms from the inside, her migrating, dotted lines, made of searching, fugitive points of passage, create ephemeral edges and shifting boundaries in the immediate act of becoming or dissolving as they explore a space they cannot remain in, the space of their uncertainty.
She is interested in the space between things, in gaps, in blind spots, in the space between stars and minute particles, the silence between sounds and the opening between thoughts. In her dotted line drawings, the spaces between the dots set up a rhythm that continuously shifts the focus between inside and outside space, emphasizing their inseparability and returning the viewer to the primacy of the ground.
She has long been magnetized by the color blue, which appears often in her artwork. With its unique, inexpressible effect on the eye, an energy that is a contradiction composed of excitement and tranquility, blue has a deep emotional resonance for her, associated with the life of the spirit, with healing and transcendence.
Originally from Denver, Colorado, Samelson currently lives and works in both New York City and Delhi, NY.
She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Sarah Lawrence College and is a recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Corporation of Yaddo, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
Samelson’s work has been exhibited extensively in galleries and museums throughout the United States and Europe including ODETTA, the Salena Gallery, Five Myles, Main Window, Trestle Gallery, Site Brooklyn, Snug Harbor Cultural Center, the Nobel Museum in Stockholm and a retrospective at the Loyola University Museum of Art in Chicago.
She has been a visiting artist at the University of Virginia and the ceramics factory Ditta Grazia Majoliche Artistiche in Deruta, Italy and her public artwork, commissioned by New Jersey Transit, is permanently on view at the Hudson Bergen Light Rail’s Second Street Station in Hoboken, NJ.
Her work has been reproduced and reviewed in the New York Times, Art Forum, New York Arts, New American Painting and elsewhere, and is represented in several private and public collections including the Rubin Museum of Art, the Library of Congress, Chase Manhattan Bank, Dow Jones, and the Loyola University Museum of Art.