About SAM
Sam is an artist based in New York City. He is currently pursuing an MFA in Industrial Design at Parsons School of Design, with a BFA and Architecture Minor from Cornell. He uses paint, sculpture, and digital media to explore the relationship of perception and creation. By invoking the perpetual human experience of searching for clarity from ambiguity, he honors a universal struggle to build meaning.
Sam’s art has been featured in Cornell's Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Boston City Hall, Miami Art Week, and one of 1stDibs' first cryptoart exhibitions. Additionally, he was accepted into the 2020 Best of SUNY and SUNY Chancellor’s Gallery Exhibitions. Sam was selected for Cornell’s 2020 Anderson Ranch Painting Scholarship, a \art grant, BitBasel’s CryptoArt for Impact and Innovation Challenge, and the 2020 Edith Adams & Walter King Stone Award in recognition of work filled with promise in advance of his thesis year. He had the honor of being selected for the first digital art collection on the moon, contained in a nickel disc aboard the US' first return mission in over 50 years in February 2024. Sam has collaborated with Ponce Neuroscience Lab at Harvard University as part of his thesis exhibition, and continues to partner with their team.
In my creative process, I harness the innate perceptual tool of pareidolia, which we evolved to find patterns in our surroundings regardless of their relevance.
We all inherently seek meaning in uncertainty — this is most powerfully exhibited in the context of vision. This drive to create something from nothing parallels the experience of falling asleep. When we close our eyes in the dark, the dark, fuzzy vision that we see is called “eigengrau,” German for “intrinsic grey.” This color condition precedes all of our dreams and many of our greatest ideas.
Creativity flourishes with limitation, and the rich character of darkness likely spurred the creation of countless prehistoric myths and legends, ways of communicating, and artistic methods.
There is a curious consistency in the visual language of artistic and technological expressions of the intrapersonal experience. It is the imagery of dreams, and of iterative understanding of our surroundings. My desire to share such landscapes of mind drives my practice.
WHDH 7 News Boston: "Out Of This World Artwork" (2/23/24)
Are Poets the New Painters? (4/20/22)
What Inspires My Sculptural Projections? (9/14/22)
An Interview with Perime Gallery (2/01/2021)