The Hole is happy to current Sam’s, a solo exhibition by a Juxtapoz-favorite, Samantha Rosenwald. For this particular thematic exhibition, Rosenwald transforms the common-or-garden pinball dive bar right into a colored-pencil-on-canvas fantasia—an grownup playground of noise, indulgence, and, most crucially, loneliness.
Although the bar is full, nobody is basically there. Patrons are faceless and fragmented, lowered by compositional amputation to physique components or equipment. In 4 of Cups, regardless of a seven-foot-wide canvas, we solely see our bodies from neck to elbow. In Bottoms Up, it’s principally simply legs and flooring: the one eye contact in the whole present comes from a canine and a few googly eyes caught to a serviette holder. Stripped of identification, the characters turn into outlined by manufacturers and visible cues—a woman’s Ganni footwear, an On-line Ceramics tee—materials indicators of shallow cultural which means.
Six works are modeled on classic pinball machine headboards—ignored artwork kinds that Rosenwald reimagines as autobiographical video games. These canvases remix retro aesthetics into hyper-personal, anxious vignettes. Enjoyable Home Mirror Stage turns into a circus of physique dysmorphia; Lock Down Rage Cage confronts an ex throughout covid; Shy Spy Leg-O-Imaginative and prescient gamifies social anxiousness. With each bit, Rosenwald builds a psychological funhouse, a self-portrait by means of pinball cupboard.
The present is deeply immersive and eerily cohesive. Although impressed by an actual L.A. bar, Sam’s feels wholly invented. Customized pint glasses, printed coasters, even a bathroom paper holder lined in graffiti—all reinforce this unusual parallel world. Work reference one another, Easter eggs abound, and the entire exhibition glows underneath a neon-lit umbrella. Titles and compositions typically emerge from that glow, then accumulate which means as Rosenwald obsessively renders each element.
Although it seems playful, Rosenwald’s chosen medium—coloured pencil—is something however simple. “There’s a performative component to it,” she says. “Every mark is seen. You may see the exhausting perfectionism in each stroke.” What appears to be like like digital polish from afar reveals, up shut, an virtually manic density of hand-drawn texture. The inadequacy of the medium turns into a part of the which means: reaching for greatness utilizing one thing fragile, childlike, and inherently restricted.
Loneliness—declared a public well being disaster within the U.S. in 2023—haunts the present. Dive bars, usually constructed for revelry, turn into cruelly ironic if you’re alone: pretzels, sizzling canine, cocaine and cigarettes seem as props in a disorienting, joyless theater of dissociation. These vices, meant to convey pleasure, as an alternative appear to underscore a failure to attach.
“All of us search pleasure, connection, and freedom,” Rosenwald writes. “However typically we notice we’re extra alone than we thought. The neon sparkles off, the ‘open’ signal flips to ‘closed,’ and the thrill turns into a hangover. These moments of public pleasure—seen by beer-colored glasses—transform fleeting and shallow.”
