Space So Close, So Far, 2023
Acrylic, newsprint, oil pastel, enamel on canvas, 18 x 24 in.

Lisa Samudio (b. 1993, Fresno, CA) is an artist newly based in Oakland, California. Raised in Albuquerque, Sumudio studied art at the University of New Mexico and trained as a sign painter with her father. Her mixed-media works on paper, wood, and canvas are the inspired merger of advertising iconography and her own obscurantist agenda. Lisa balances looseness and precision like a free-spirited tightrope walker, allowing for chance within a highly rigid structure. A literal layering of images allows her to explore transformation – her most significant preoccupation – in real time and space, along with erosion, repetition, and patterning. This new body of work aims to specifically translate her feelings of vulnerability in a new community, and embodies a commitment to living with and understanding change. Samudio lives in the East Bay with her nine-year-old daughter and is a garden teacher at two elementary schools in the Fruitvale area. This is her first exhibition.

Special thanks to Grace Rosario Perkins, Gabriel Garza, and Valentina.