A 2005 graduate of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Samantha French’s body of work explores themes of escape, tranquility, and nostalgia, drawing inspiration from her childhood summers spent in the lakes of Northern Minnesota where she was born and raised. Her paintings, rooted in reflections and memories, capture the vibrancy of light and movement, evoking a sense of calm and connection. Now based in the Hudson Valley, New York, she is a full-time painter whose works are part of numerous private and public collections across the world.

"This ongoing body of work is focused on swimmers underwater and above. Using vague yet consuming memories from my childhood summers spent immersed in the tepid lakes of northern Minnesota, I attempt to recreate the quiet tranquility of water and nature; of days spent sinking and floating, still and peaceful. These paintings are a link to my home and continual search for the feeling of the sun on my face and warm summer days at the lake. They are an escape, a subtle reprieve from the day-to-day. This combination of memory, observation and photography has allowed me to preserve the transitory qualities of water and remembrance."

“I began this body OF WORK feeling lost, still curious. Holed up at home unable to move my left arm. I painted my mothers peace lily several times. A white flag up and down in a sea of green. Will I ever surrender to my imagination?

I dreamt of the beach when the snow came, dreamt of picking up shells when the ice came, dreamt of hot, wet air when the birds sang. Arm healed up, I drove a good bit of my shell collection down to Charlottesville. Over the next couple months they became my tools, in my hands and in my head. 

I traced them along a sandy clay body, I traced their outlines in the voids of washed canvas. The mollusks that grew them put their lives into pattern, a document of where, what, and when. In my bucket: all broken up for me to piece together into an impossible puzzle.”

Jeri Eisenberg works primarily with non-traditional and alternative photo-based techniques. She represses or subverts traditional photography's emphasis on the representational qualities of the medium, and emphasizes instead the medium's expressive nature. She employs a strong sense of materiality and seductive surfaces in her work, to evoke sense memories and visceral connections. Her work steadfastly serves as an affirmation of beauty in the everyday natural world, but is tinged with the bittersweet - a reminder of the temporal condition, and an elegy for life.

My long term series, 'A Sojourn in Seasons', consists of five chapters - one in black and white and four seasonal chapters in color. The large-scale, abstracted images of the treed landscape in this series are captured with an oversized pinhole or defocused lens. The images are usually segmented and presented as diptychs, triptychs or quads, printed on long panels of Japanese Kozo paper and infused with encaustic medium. The final presentation of translucent panels hang from acrylic bars with magnets, floating off the wall, casting shadows, and moving gently with air currents in a room. I began this series as my father was losing both his vision and his memory. As the images fade in and out of recognizable form, they echo our ephemeral grasp on life.