Work samples

  • Object Impermanence (installation shot)
    Object Impermanence (installation shot)
    Object Impermanence is an ongoing site specific installation. When this installation is shown, a new painted tile is placed on the stand with ice on top at the beginning of each day for the duration of the exhibition. These hand painted acrylic tiles directly references tiles from an important site specific to the location of the exhibition . As the ice melts, water alters or washes away part of the painting. The tray below collects the water and the runoff from each event. A videocamera, installed above the stand displaying the painted tile and ice, records and projects a live feed of the action directly onto the exhibition space's floor at a scale approximately the size of the original site’s floor. Afterwards each tile is displayed on the wall with it’s predecessors. For the project's most recent exhibition location, Washington, DC, the tiles are based on the floor tiles of the Library of Congress. drawings on acrylic, gouache, ice, videocamera, MDF, live stream video projection on styrene, dimensions variable, 2019
  • Counterweight
    Counterweight
    This exhibition,Counterweight, invites viewers to consider what is permanent. What are the artifacts we will leave behind? What happens to the lightweight, inconsequential objects we call disposable but are in fact as enduring as the things we intend to last? It is difficult to grasp the permanent nature of the temporary objects of convenience, many of which sustain our existence, but cost so little to produce that they are often given away. Once disposed of, these objects cease to exist in our minds, but they continue to exist somewhere else, somewhere out of sight. How do we reconcile their transience in our lives with their longevity in the world? This work seeks to understand these objects by transforming them, by seeing them in new terms -- perhaps in the way the rest of the natural world sees them, rather than how we do.
  • Entropic Irrigation System III
    Entropic Irrigation System III
    Entropic Irrigation System III was developed to support and manage the melting ice frozen in the form of five monuments including the Taj Mahal, the Colosseum, a Mayan Temple, the Parthenon, and a Pyramid. As these ice monuments melt, the water drains through plastic tubing to water the fern growing beneath. Each monument displayed has three material versions; version one - frozen water, version 2 - sand mixed with water, version 3 - concrete (a combination of cement, sand and water). Each material is allowed to deteriorate undisturbed throughout the exhibition. The ferns selected for this system are native to the area and are able to manage flooding and prevent erosion.
  • Solar Power / Solar System
    Solar Power / Solar System
    Produced as a collaborative installation with Andy Holtin, Solar Power/Solar System is a project designed to explore our view of the natural world from within our built and technology-mediated environment. Far from being a simplistic or exclusively critical view of this relationship, this project seeks to bring a piece of the natural world back into our experience through some of the same tools and technology that contribute to our distance from it. The sunlight collected by the solar panels during the day is recycled to power the LEDs which illuminate the orbs and cast light strongly onto the back of the PVC panel, which has been drilled with a pattern of small holes to replicate the actual night sky of April 14, 2018, at 9:00pm, as would be seen from Baltimore, Maryland. Each hole or star is also fitted with a small segment of fiber optic cable to transmit the light from the back to the front of the panel more completely and increase visibility and luminosity of the star field. In a city of lights and power, the Solar Power/Solar System imports the lost and subtle light of the stars, while, as a light emitting installation in a festival of light installations, it also contributes to that loss. Viewers are invited to stand, sit, or lay in the astroturf and gaze at the actual stars that would be visible if they were not hidden by our own network of lights that make city navigation possible.

About Samantha

Baltimore City - Bromo Tower Arts District

Samantha Sethi’s interdisciplinary practice embraces a blend of physical and digital objects exploring the way the world we see and move through can be modeled both visually and experientially. Through natural materials and processes, such as ice, sunlight, and sediment, Sethi creates works which are simultaneously actions and images, both the event at hand and the drawing or trace used to represent it through time. These works find their source in the artist's view of… more

Fossil Futures

These works posit a future that can no longer distinguish between the source and the imitation. Calling on the form and format of the fossils we rely on to narrate the world before we were in it, Fossil Futures contemplates a time when our replicas and remnants are themselves ancient but newly discovered. As imperishable objects that have outlived their context, they are convenient substitutions for the building of new narratives as unreal as themselves. 
  • Fossil Futures Installation Shot
    Fossil Futures Installation Shot
  • Fossil Futures: 12.2.22 005; Toy, turtle
    Fossil Futures: 12.2.22 005; Toy, turtle
    cast concrete, led, acrylic, paper, MDF
  • Fossil Futures: 12.2.22 005; Toy, turtle (detail)
    Fossil Futures: 12.2.22 005; Toy, turtle (detail)
    cast concrete, led, acrylic, paper, MDF
  • Fossil Futures: 12.2.22 Plant, plastic, fern
    Fossil Futures: 12.2.22 Plant, plastic, fern
    cast concrete, led, acrylic, paper, MDF
  • Fossil Futures: Plant, branch, gold plastic
    Fossil Futures: Plant, branch, gold plastic
    cast concrete, led, acrylic, paper, MDF

Object Impermanence

Object Impermanence is an ongoing site specific installation. When this installation is shown, a new painted tile is placed on the stand with ice on top at the beginning of each day for the duration of the exhibition. These hand painted acrylic tiles directly references tiles from an important site specific to the location of the exhibition . As the ice melts, water alters or washes away part of the painting. The tray below collects the water and the runoff from each event. A videocamera, installed above the stand displaying the painted tile and ice, records and projects a live feed of the action directly onto the exhibition space's floor at a scale approximately the size of the original site’s floor. Afterwards each tile is displayed on the wall with it’s predecessors. The viewer is invited to consider how they percieve the real physical representation in contrast with the enlarged mediated digital version in real time. For the project's most recent exhibition location, Washington, DC, the tiles are based on the floor tiles of the Library of Congress.
  • Object Impermanence (detail)
    Object Impermanence (detail)
    drawings on acrylic, gouache, ice, videocamera, MDF, live stream video projection on styrene, dimensions variable, 2019
  • Object Impermanence (detail)
    Object Impermanence (detail)
    drawings on acrylic, gouache, ice, videocamera, MDF, live stream video projection on styrene, dimensions variable, 2019
  • Object Impermanence (tiles)
    Object Impermanence (tiles)
    drawings on acrylic, gouache, ice, videocamera, MDF, live stream video projection on styrene, dimensions variable, 2019
  • Object Impermanence (installation shot)
    Object Impermanence (installation shot)

Entropic Irrigation System III

Entropic Irrigation System III was developed to support and manage the melting ice frozen in the form of five monuments including the Taj Mahal, the Colosseum, a Mayan Temple, the Parthenon, and a Pyramid. As these ice monuments melt, the water drains through plastic tubing to water the fern growing beneath. Each monument displayed has three material versions; version one - frozen water, version 2 - sand mixed with water, version 3 - concrete (a combination of cement, sand and water). Each material is allowed to deteriorate undisturbed throughout the exhibition. The ferns selected for this system are native to the area and are able to manage flooding and prevent erosion. 
  • Entropic Irrigation System III
    Entropic Irrigation System III
    Entropic Irrigation System III was developed to support and manage the melting ice frozen in the form of five monuments including the Taj Mahal, the Colosseum, a Mayan Temple, the Parthenon, and a Pyramid. As these ice monuments melt, the water drains through plastic tubing to water the fern growing beneath. Each monument displayed has three material versions; version one - frozen water, version 2 - sand mixed with water, version 3 - concrete (a combination of cement, sand and water). Each material is allowed to deteriorate undisturbed throughout the exhibition. The ferns selected for this system are native to the area and are able to manage flooding and prevent erosion.
  • Entropic Irrigation System (Colosseum)
    Entropic Irrigation System (Colosseum)
  • Entropic Irrigation System III (pyramid)
    Entropic Irrigation System III (pyramid)

Counterweight

Counterweight, invites viewers to consider what is permanent. What are the artifacts we will leave behind? What happens to the lightweight, inconsequential objects we call disposable but are in fact as enduring as the things we intend to last? It is difficult to grasp the permanent nature of the temporary objects of convenience, many of which sustain our existence, but cost so little to produce that they are often given away. Once disposed of, these objects cease to exist in our minds, but they continue to exist somewhere else, somewhere out of sight. How do we reconcile their transience in our lives with their longevity in the world? This work seeks to understand these objects by transforming them, by seeing them in new terms -- perhaps in the way the rest of the natural world sees them, rather than how we do.
  • Counterweight
    Counterweight
    This exhibition,Counterweight, invites viewers to consider what is permanent. What are the artifacts we will leave behind? What happens to the lightweight, inconsequential objects we call disposable but are in fact as enduring as the things we intend to last? It is difficult to grasp the permanent nature of the temporary objects of convenience, many of which sustain our existence, but cost so little to produce that they are often given away. Once disposed of, these objects cease to exist in our minds, but they continue to exist somewhere else, somewhere out of sight. How do we reconcile their transience in our lives with their longevity in the world? This work seeks to understand these objects by transforming them, by seeing them in new terms -- perhaps in the way the rest of the natural world sees them, rather than how we do.
  • Concrete Necropolis
    Concrete Necropolis
    Concrete, MDF, reclaimed lumber, dimensions variable, 2019
  • Fossil Futures: 3.12.18. 005; Pendant, fish
    Fossil Futures: 3.12.18. 005; Pendant, fish
    Concrete,MDF, Acrylic, LEDs, dimensions variable, 2019
  • Counterweight exhibition
    Counterweight exhibition
    Disposable plastic containers documented as photogram cyanotypes.

Solar Power/ Solar System

Produced as a collaborative installation/system with Andy Holtin, Solar Power/Solar System is a project designed to explore our view of the natural world from within our built and technology-mediated environment. Far from being a simplistic 

or exclusively critical view of this relationship, this project seeks to bring a piece of the 
natural world back into our experience through some of the same tools and technology 
that contribute to our distance from it. 
The sunlight collected by the solar panels during the day is recycled to power the LEDs which illuminate the orbs and cast light strongly onto the back of the PVC panel, which has been drilled with a pattern of small holes to replicate the actual night sky of April 14, 2018, at 9:00pm, as would be seen from Baltimore, Maryland. Each hole or star is also fitted with a small segment of fiber optic cable to transmit the light from the back to the front of the panel more completely and increase visibility and luminosity of the star field. In a city of lights and power, the Solar 
Power/Solar System imports the lost and subtle light of the stars, while, as a light emitting 
installation in a festival of light installations, it also contributes to that loss. 
Viewers are invited to stand, sit, or lay in the astroturf and gaze at the actual stars that would be visible if they were not hidden by our own network of lights that make city navigation possible. 


  • Solar Power / Solar System
    Solar Power / Solar System
    Produced as a collaborative installation with Andy Holtin, Solar Power/Solar System is a project designed to explore our view of the natural world from within our built and technology-mediated environment. Far from being a simplistic or exclusively critical view of this relationship, this project seeks to bring a piece of the natural world back into our experience through some of the same tools and technology that contribute to our distance from it. The sunlight collected by the solar panels during the day is recycled to power the LEDs which illuminate the orbs and cast light strongly onto the back of the PVC panel, which has been drilled with a pattern of small holes to replicate the actual night sky of April 14, 2018, at 9:00pm, as would be seen from Baltimore, Maryland. Each hole or star is also fitted with a small segment of fiber optic cable to transmit the light from the back to the front of the panel more completely and increase visibility and luminosity of the star field. In a city of lights and power, the Solar Power/Solar System imports the lost and subtle light of the stars, while, as a light emitting installation in a festival of light installations, it also contributes to that loss. Viewers are invited to stand, sit, or lay in the astroturf and gaze at the actual stars that would be visible if they were not hidden by our own network of lights that make city navigation possible.
  • Solar Power / Solar System (view from underneath)
    Solar Power / Solar System (view from underneath)
  • Solar Power / Solar System video documentation
    Produced as a collaborative installation with Andy Holtin, Solar Power/Solar System is a project designed to explore our view of the natural world from within our built and technology-mediated environment. Far from being a simplistic or exclusively critical view of this relationship, this project seeks to bring a piece of the natural world back into our experience through some of the same tools and technology that contribute to our distance from it. The sunlight collected by the solar panels during the day is recycled to power the LEDs which illuminate the orbs and cast light strongly onto the back of the PVC panel, which has been drilled with a pattern of small holes to replicate the actual night sky of April 14, 2018, at 9:00pm, as would be seen from Baltimore, Maryland. Each hole or star is also fitted with a small segment of fiber optic cable to transmit the light from the back to the front of the panel more completely and increase visibility and luminosity of the star field.

Cast Offs

These small objects were produced as a rumination on the lives of materials, prompted by the artists' attempt to understand and reconcile the disparate frames of time in which objects and our experiences with them exist. The convenience-driven plastics that pass through our lives – though some facilitate levels of technology, sanitation, and hygiene that radically improve our lives – might be touched only once, but may persist in the world for hundreds of years. Similarly, the use of concrete, which enables the sheer scale of our civilizations through its strength and malleability, is slowly shrinking the coastlines of the continents on which we build. Both materials exist in unparalleled possibility and longevity, though our perceptions of them differ wildly. This work seeks to understand these objects and materials by transforming them, by seeing them in new terms—perhaps in the way the rest of the natural world sees them, rather than how we do.
  • Cast Off #4
    Cast Off #4
    Cast concrete, 2019
  • CastOff #10
    CastOff #10
    cast concrete, mirrored acrylic, 2020
  • Cast Off #7
    Cast Off #7
    cast concrete, mirrored acrylic, 2020