Artist Statement
Andrea Samory’s approach to art employs familiar yet uncanny images to create a mirror for collective fears and expectations towards the future. He combines animation,
3D sculpting and 3D printing with SFX sculpting techniques, to materialize virtual images and tropes.
In his work, the philosophies of Speculative Realism and Assemblage Theory get infused into the genres of Sci-Fi, Body Horror, Cosmic Horror and Magical Realism - a
narrative created as a response to nowadays incessant flux of both dystopic and utopic information regarding global society, climate, politics, technology.
His vocabulary takes advantage of shiny, soft and colorful materials to attract the viewer into a world of natural corruption and uncannyness - provoking the ambivalent feelings of repulsion and fascination, alienation and familiarity, recognition and corruption. This approach takes inspiration from how virality (both as a biology-related concept and an internet-related concept), and intangible forces in general, shape our everyday lives.
The recurring themes of growth, entropy, mythology and human hybris are given shape through the recombination, aggregation, distortion, and assemblage of natural textures
and figures. He combines 3d sculpting and 3d printing with SFX and more traditional sculpting techniques, to attract the viewer into a world of natural corruption and
uncannyness - provoking the ambivalent feelings of repulsion and fascination, alienation and recognition.
____________________________________________
Series - CHIMERA:
“Chimera” - originally identifying a specific monster belonging to the Greek Mythology - describes any mythical or fictional creature with parts taken from various animals.
The monster reminds Nature’s capacity for endless growth and adaptation, with no regards for circumstances, consequences, morals, suffering, etc. Humans have an innate ambivalent yearning and terror for such amoral power.
The Chimera series delves into the creation of an absurd new nature, which is a reflection on nowaday’s fears and hopes for a Post-Human and Trans-Human future.
The imaginary borrows from speculations into undiscovered animal species and cryptids, as well as mythology and religion. This archetypical bestiary is paralleled with contemporary utopic and dystopic projections: DNA manipulation and bioengineering, environmental disasters, and historical cathastrophes involving toxic chemicals/radiations. Limbs and parts are combined into realistic looking organisms which, upon closer inspection, could never exist in real life. The shapes are as abstract as they are realistic, as ridiculous as they are terrifying. They highlight our endless -and morbose- fascination with powerful, larger-than-life creations, along with the fears and expectations that we have for the future.
___________________________________________
Series - SIGNAL:
Complex yet primordial emotions such as terror, anxiety, nostalgia are constantly triggered by that “hose to the face” of information that is the Internet. Intangible and virtual tropes are more and more in control of our physical and primitive bodies.
As humans, we use our ancestral emotive system -evolved to achieve specific and limited survival scopes- to interact with structures that overwhelm it in terms of scale and
extent.
This series is a speculation into how to convey the most intense emotional response through the least amount of hyperrealistic and/or figurative information - testing
our innate, animalistic push towards recognition.
Shiny, multiple, perfect abstract shapes overwhelm and engulf small pieces of flesh, which end up acting as beacons, or signals, for intuition and empathy.
This dychotomy of virtual vs real is a reflection into Social Media as glamourized dystopia, and into how animals and humans reflect their identity onto their own bodies.
___________________________________________
Series - INFECTION:
The Infection series is an exploration into how invisible and virtual forces influence our visible and physical everyday lives.
Capsule-like geometries are prevalent in the graphic and industrial design nowadays. Shiny, crisp, gentle and rounded shapes have surrounded our virtual environments
(websites, apps UI, infographics, CG art, etc.) for the most part of 2010’s-2020’s - a friendly facade for the complex system of interconnections that is the web. Like the
pretty colors that a fungal infection might display from the outside, systems of aggregation and emergence can look deceivingly beautiful and familiar - yet their inner workings
are impossible to fully comprehend or visualize.
In the sculptures, cold and virtual looking capsules are arranged into patterns reminiscent of a primordial sense of natural growth, and clustered onto biological-looking substrates.
They evoke the abstract yet detailed landscapes of cells, spores and tissues seen through a Scanning electron microscope.
The concept of infection is evoked as a continuous struggle between growth and entropy - both at the microscopic scale and at the cosmic scale, both in the physical
world and in the virtual world.
Infection-Assemblage is a complex iteration of the series, driven by Deleuze’s concept of Assemblage, and Manuel DeLanda’s Assemblage Theory. Assemblages are a
combination of heterogeneous parts (materials, textures, patterns) that is assembled into a coherent object, whilst maintaining each own’s identity.
