October 11 – 17, 2020

This is the first solo exhibition by artist Sam Machia, made possible by the 2018-2019 UNCG Artistic Merit Award.

“abacus, myth” is an artist’s record of exploration of the iterative
nature of personal narrative: the patterns, habits, and structures
we use to reaffirm who we are, and who others are, to each
other and to ourselves.
This body of work was directly influenced by craft tradition
and personal inquiry into the realization of the body and the self
under institutional constraint. In this work, painting and drawing
are first situated as a physical extension of the body before they
are able to be understood as a mechanism for repositioning the
self within the world. Material and image are subservient to
meditative repetition, reaction, and subsequent reflection as
works are pieced together, built up, torn apart, reworked,
cobbled into the gestic evidence of becoming.