Cole Case and Samantha Fields
July 1 - August 31, 2020
Images from the July 3 Zoom Opening Reception
Download Samantha Fields Resume
Press Release
For our Summer exhibition, “6’ Apart – In It Together”, we are featuring two Los Angeles-based artists who have been making work this year that address both sides of the pandemic isolation orders.
Cole Case, paints images that are devoid of humans except for residual evidence of their actions. Bagged groceries that have been delivered are seen through a glass door or products placed out on a table outside to quarantine before they can be brought in the house. The way that Case presents these commonplace images become haunting reminders of the world in which we live. There is a deep sense of pathos and loneliness in his paintings on paper.
Samantha Fields’ aerial view paintings, on the other hand, of multitudes of people seen congregating on ocean beaches have an immediate sense of doom because of the possibly of their spreading the Covid-19 due to their lack of social distancing. What would have been playful images, a few months ago, of throngs frolicking on the beaches are now horrific because we are knowledgeable that this invisible virus can be anywhere. The aerial imagery gives us a forced distance from those on the beach which imposes a lack of individuality; so those depicted are just flecks of paint and not men, women and children.
Artists respond to their times and the social/physical environments of those times. Cole Case and Samantha Fields paintings are remarkable documents of our 2020 Pandemic Stay-At-Home era.
Artist Statements
Cole Case
My drawings and paintings have always followed a series of kind of unwritten personal rules.
First, they are observational. Second, they are personal. Third, I try to avoid any directly topical subject matter. I draw and paint that which moves me emotionally in my immediate visual experience and environment. So I find it ironically wonderful to be included in this two-person show with my dear friend Samantha Fields, a show curated by David E. Stone that happens to be built around a very topical theme.
I actually had plenty of practice in 2019 working under quarantine-like conditions as a result of caring for my ailing parents, a situation that demanded my presence at home far more often than in the past. The events surrounding COVID-19 and the George Floyd BLM protests forced certain imagery into my immediate observational surroundings from March until today, which was and continues to be a newly charged visual field. I reacted immediately to this in my drawings and paintings. I want to avoid the didactic and simply record the images that are unique to these times and to my own personal experience.
Samantha Fields: Crowds2020
When the lockdown began, I set regular hours for “Painting with Sam” as part of a class project. Every week, for 5 hours, I would aim the camera at my table and paint with students who wanted “company”. For this, I decided to do the same project I had assigned to them; Pandemic Painting. Every week for seven weeks, students had to upload a painting that related to their time in isolation. I kept telling my students that we were all in this together, so it seemed to make sense that I would do the project too, in solidarity.
Meanwhile, in my studio, I started pouring through my photo archives to cull images for new work. In doing so, I discovered a cache of “crowd” photos. They were older images; political conventions, crowded beaches, concerts, & tourist groups. Seeing these kinds of images after having been in isolation for so long was jarring. They represented a gone world, they looked like danger, like something I might never experience again. I started painting them on a lark, showing students how a few small strokes can be a figure.
It is an odd sensation to paint the multitudes from afar, to paint with others via a tenuous digital connection. My work has always been about disaster; ecological, familial and political. When the pandemic began, it precipitated a crisis in my work, because I didn’t know what this disaster looked like. Now I know that it looks like us.
