"Pleasing Sorrow," Samantha Harrison

KP PROJECTS is proud to present an exhibition of new paintings, textiles, and other medium by Samantha Harrison titled "Pleasing Sorrow."

Samantha Harrison’s work focuses inward, toward the self, capturing in painted, drawn, and embroidered on textiles, the multifaceted thoughts that run compulsively through the mind. The work is a process of excavation and exorcism, observation and catharsis, from which new skin can grow. Introspective, self-deprecating, rebellious, and self-aware, each medium, including a new series of videos being shown for the first time, echoes the duality of the artist’s discourse with desire, worth, love and forgiveness.

The presentation of Harrison’s work in an ornamental and decorative fashion is in contrast to the outwardly cynical nature of some pieces. Samantha’s hand sewn and embroidered banners are declarations against banality. Some of the more explicit or self-deprecating content alludes to satire and reveals the quiet shrewdness of a self-realized person in spite of the expressed vulnerability. Touching provocatively upon sex and desire in some pieces punctuates how the complicated social association with sex and procreation is a private and intimate experience, yet women’s autonomy of self and choice are in public and political view.