Graceina Samosir is a fresh BFA and artist currently residing in Ottawa, still on the lookout for the definition of home. Her studio practice includes drawing, painting, and illustration using both traditional and digital means.
Graceina’s work is driven by her thoughts and sentiments about her family, friends, peers, lovers, her ghosts, her shadows, her pasts, her aspirations, her bizarre and also surface level contemplations, and ultimately, herself (and the many parallel or alternate versions of herself). She likes to give the spotlight to the seemingly insignificant and unimpressive mundane occurrences that involve the people in her immediate and extended surrounding, with a hint of nostalgia to stir up feelings of odd, and sometimes eerie, familiarity. Using a combination of painterly, gestural, and graphic approaches to drawing, she strives to convey her world in a raw manner, underpinning the significance of internal monologues, honesty, transparency, vulnerability, and embracing the malleability of the process. Additionally, her work explores the subjects of self-awareness, subconscious desires, lonesomeness, impressionability, somber longing, separation and loss, false perception and introspection, of wistfully looking back to the past and being apprehensive of the future, and includes questioning the perpetuity of memory and the (in)existence of permanence. Her work also plays with juxtaposed dualities: the idea of absence and presence, of perpetuity and transience, of order and chaos, of something done thoroughly and something done in a cursory manner, of intuitive and childlike haphazardness and of mindful decision making, of a sense of displacement and of a sense of security, of fragmented scenarios and of sequential storytelling, of subtle nuances and of nervous energy, of probing repetition and of open endedness, of contradicting moments and of co-existing dichotomies (you can stop me anytime). A major underlying premise that sews all these things together is the autobiographical nature from which they stem, essentially making the amalgamation of her work a reflection of her universe, and therefore, a self-portrait.
