Samantha Nye

Samantha Nye is a painter, video, and installation artist living in Philadelphia. For the first decade of her life, she was a relatively unsuccessful child model. At five years old, she remembers her mother driving her to South Beach casting offices as she energetically rehearsed the line, “Hello, my name is Samantha Nye, and I’m 7 years old… This is my right profile…” She often performed seven. She learned early about performance and identity, about artifice and bad acting. When her adorableness faded in time for her Bat Mitzvah, so did her young career. She learned early about the consequences of aging. Through reenactments of 1960s pop culture (Scopitone Films and Slim Aarons’s photography) she reframes seduction by centering aging bodies in acts of pleasure. Her cast is made up of her mother, her grandmother, her matriarchs’ life-long friends, and lesbian elders. Her work imagines alternative queer histories and wildly decadent futures.