Lisa Jarrett, Melanie Stevens, and Samantha Wall created three simultaneous exhibitions as a singular gesture. Their themes—the racialized body, the poetry in its cultural tells, and the wit required to endure criticism—disrupted Portland’s oft ubiquitous fall exhibition calendar.

Samantha Wall’s three monochromatic ink figure drawings enter a place of quiet introspection that explore identity through a diasporic lens. Wall, an artist originally from Seoul, South Korea, and now based in Portland, works primarily in ink to create sinewy and mysterious renditions of the female form.

Visual artist Samantha Wall leads Artslandia through her creative process and shares insight on her sources of inspiration and hope.

Best Curation: Russo Lee Gallery

The booth is not so much a joyful noise as a cryptic whisper among the fair’s cacophony.

Russo Lee Gallery: Meanwhile, this Portland, Ore., gallery serves up some maverick work that includes Jo Hamilton’s portrait of Las Vegas types (“Uncle Dougie & John Muhato”) made from mixed crocheted yarn, Michael Brophy’s photorealistic oils on canvas of Oregon lava fields and Samantha Wall’s eerie graphite-and-conté-crayon-on-paper experiment in double vision, “Second Sight.”

On the regional front, Winchester Galleries (Victoria, B.C.) and Russo Lee Gallery (Portland) make exceptionally strong showings.

The stars of Russo Lee are Samantha Wall, whose meticulous graphite-and-conté-crayon-on-paper drawings (especially “Second Sight”) are downright visionary, and Jo Hamilton, whose mixed crocheted-yarn creations are both wacky and virtuosic.

Indivisible is a series of graphite and charcoal portraits of multiracial women done by artist Samantha Wall. According to Wall, it is a study to understand her own dual ethnicity and capture subtle human expressions which transcend gender or race.

Learn how Samantha Wall’s monochrome drawings offer highly personal explorations of identity, race, and interior life.

Some of the most striking elements "See Me See You" are the things that aren’t there. In a series of graphite drawings of women of color, Wall renders her subjects' eyes, nose and lips—the features that most often telegraph race—in photorealistic detail. They jump from the paper, perfectly rendered, while the rest of the figure disappears into the whiteness of the background, into the whiteness of the world.

In the 1997 obituary for Willem de Kooning, the New York Times noted an anecdote from the early 1950s: “An often repeated story has it that the critic Clement Greenberg, who championed pure abstraction, insisted that it had become ‘impossible today to paint a face,’ to which Mr. de Kooning replied, ‘’That’s right, and it’s impossible not to.’”

I thought about that as I looked at Samantha Wall’s series of drawings of women’s faces at Laura Russo Gallery. Some 60 years after de Kooning thought it both impossible to paint a face and impossible to avoid painting a face, Wall has found a way to depict faces that is somehow bold, restrained and, most impressively, fresh.

Wall creates larger-than-life portraits that stop you dead in your tracks. Drawings as big as seven feet by six feet, they're a collection of layered marks, an assembly of graphite, charcoal, and ink. Ranging from silhouette studies of women to larger pieces depicting Wall herself—in twisted and tense poses, with names like "Flayed" and "At the Threshold"—her work is masterful in skill and composition, in positive and negative space and the tension between the two.

‘There must be some consistency,’ Samantha Wall insists. ‘There must be something that remains resistant to change.’

The fact that this needs to be insisted upon at all is testament to the disquieting power of her work, and the conflicted impulses that feed it: the attempt to affirm and give agency to individual experience, and the attendant anxiety as to whether that’s even possible. The particular series of drawings that prompts this conversation is Let Your Eyes Adjust to the Dark, a collection that presents a number of women’s faces and shoulders, black-and-white on a plain background and obscured by visual distortion, as if a photograph was improperly developed or a watercolour splashed with water.

Korean born artist Samantha Wall’s black and white works explore the complexities of race, particularly her own multi-raciality’ between living in Korea and now the United States. First featured on our blog, Wall primarily works in graphite and charcoal to create detailed and conceptual drawings.

Growing up in Seoul, South Korea, Samantha Wall always felt a little different. As someone with a multiracial background she found herself between groups, and she was often ostracized because of it. She moved to the United States with her family at a young age, but she was still treated as an outsider.

"Multiracial individuals must navigate between cultural histories and social boundaries while our very existence questions, and consequently threatens, the integrity of those boundaries," she concluded. "I think that’s a great thing but it’s also an experience that can be alienating and frightening."

Let Your Eyes Adjust to the Dark is a collection of drawings by Samantha Wall that delve into her obsession with the internal emotional states that separate us as individuals, while simultaneously linking us as a whole.

Relatively recent PNCA grad Samantha Wall has amassed all the accolades of a midcareer artist, including this year’s Contemporary Northwest Art Awards at the Portland Art Museum, with her stunningly composed portraits of women.

One of the most fascinating things about Samantha Wall’s drawings on paper is the way they merge conceptual aims with virtuosic technique.