My work brings in fragments of imagery from my own lived experience, the experiences of my family, dreams, and folklore to construct representational narratives. I am interested in constructing environments that contain a complex amalgamation of emotions brought on by the actions of the figures that inhabit it.
For this body of work, I had been doing research to inform the question which guided my thesis: What is heritage? The work that I have been creating based on this question relates to my own identity as well as to what I view as a culture. The main environment I have chosen to serve as a source of imagery to build my scenes upon is that of my hometown’s annual carnival-like celebration, The Nederland Heritage Festival. It is upon these fairgrounds that I have explored what makes up the heritage of where I come from. I am interested in the idea of a constructed culture, and the characteristics that people attribute to categories like industry, gender, ethnicity, and mental illness.
Samantha Bares grew up in Nederland, Texas. Her artist father got her interested in art at a young age, and her mother, of Cuban and Mexican descent, encouraged this practice all throughout her life. After receiving her BFA in printmaking from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in 2018, Samantha became a graduate candidate at the University of Colorado Boulder. From there, she received her MFA with a concentration in Printmaking in the Spring of 2021.
Her work is held in the permanent collections of the SGCI Print Archives, the University of Utah’s Art Department Collection, the Jerry Crail Johnson’s Earth Sciences and Map Library at CU Boulder, and the Museum of Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas.