Sam Tripodi – SAIC Graduate Exhibition 2024

SAIC SHOWS 2024 GRADUATE EXHIBITIONS

Graduates

SAIC SHOWS 2024 GRADUATE EXHIBITIONS

Sam Tripodi

Master of Fine Arts in Studio, Photography

Graduate Exhibition One

samtripodi@me.com

Sam Tripodi (b. Los Angeles, 1966) is an artist exploring personal memory and symbolism within the intersecting spheres of capitalism, consumption, and the environment. At the age of 8, Sam’s parents relocated their family from Los Angeles to still-developing central Florida, where her father, a trained packaging designer, had taken work as a Disney Imagineer. The experiences of growing up in a Disney Family with a designer dad and witnessing a dramatically changing landscape, significantly influence Tripodi’s work. Formerly an accomplished corporate designer working at the crossroads of business and emerging technologies herself, she currently serves on the board of the Headlands Center for the Arts and is pursuing her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Post-graduation, Sam plans to regain her dual citizenship status in San Francisco and West Marin, California.

Sam Tripodi - Seegram's

Seegram's, 11/2023, Graphite and beeswax on paper, 16 x 12 in.

An attempt at preservation for the disregarded.

Sam Tripodi - Apple Cord Fool’s Gold, ST112023011

Apple Cord Fool’s Gold, ST112023011, 12/2023, Graphite, beeswax, and fake gold leaf on paper, 18 x 16 in.

I notice packaging – especially the inside guts of a package. They are beautiful in their simple function of containing an object. They protect and hold. They demonstrate the care given in their making and the perceived value of an object. And yet they challenge us on a social and political level as we squander these resources.

Sam Tripodi - Corner Guard, ST112023024

Corner Guard, ST112023024, 11/2023, Graphite, beeswax, and 23ct gold leaf on paper , 12 x 16 in.

Sometimes the unnoticed bit is the most beautiful.

Sam Tripodi - Untitled (A real thing about a work which is fiction, 3)

Untitled (A real thing about a work which is fiction, 3), 10/2023, Beeswax and oil paint on paper, 24 x 34 in.

Below the surface of the swamp is where the riches lie. It’s also where you might get bit. This is from a memory series, thinking about entanglements, reflection, and unhingement. The friction of the surface and resistance create material meaning.

Sam Tripodi - Untitled (A real thing about a work which is fiction, 2)

Untitled (A real thing about a work which is fiction, 2), 10/2023, Beeswax and oil paint on paper, 20 x 30 in.

Below the surface of the swamp is where the riches lie. It’s also where you might get bit. This is from a memory series, thinking about entanglements, reflection, and unhingement. The friction of the surface and resistance create material meaning.

My work is driven by an inquiry into how we are being challenged to conform to our environment, and how the natural world around us is bending and breaking under the conditions of perceived stress and the real physical pressure we place upon it.

My father was a packaging designer, my mother an artist, and I was lucky to grow up with their encouragement and teaching to use my hands to make my ideas visible. My father took his work home with him, so I had an early fascination with the drawings, materials, and schematics of his design plans. Early in my career, I was a designer who created packages for consumer goods and technology companies, and felt a persistent tension grow between my desire for aesthetic ideals and the weight of consumption these designs demand. In my art work, I’m exploring the connective tissue between concepts of fractured lands, memory made physical, atrophy of the body, and the acts of packaging and presentation.

In the works for this entry, I have examined the days during the pandemic when daily routines were constrained and repetitive, where the familiar became unrecognizable, where fear and the unknown required that we question our natural instincts, and where even the basic orientation of the horizon on the landscape seemed to be unknowable.