Samantha Van Heest (b. 1998) is an artist and art educator currently residing in the greater Washington DC area. She has exhibited her work across the United States and Europe. Her debut solo exhibition, DEEP/CLEAN, opened February 2023 at HOMME Gallery in Washington, DC. Samantha has been included in various group show at spaces such as UMBRELLA Art Fair (Washington DC); Hamiltonian Artists (Washington DC); Magma Maria (Offenbach am Main, Germany); McNeese State University (Lake Charles, LA); The University of Maryland (College Park, MD); among others. She was featured in New American Paintings South #148 and has worked for the contemporary painter Amy Sherald. She is a member of the 2024 Sparkplug Collective at DC Arts Center (Washington DC), and a Post-Graduate Resident at the Torpedo Factory (Alexandria, VA). She teaches art in the Greater Washington DC area with a focus in drawing, painting, and portfolio development. Van Heest earned a BA in Studio Art from the University of Mary Washington in 2020.

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“Utilizing still life, found objects, and textiles, my practice explores our relationships and rituals with the seemingly mundane, navigating patterns of collecting and preserving through unconventional means of presentation. 

I work from objects of contemporary domestic life that often go overlooked - the produce label sticker, jarred preserves, nipple pasties, etc. I memorialize such ephemeral discards by repurposing elements of traditional Dutch and Flemish still life with trompe l'oeil realism. Fruit appears regularly in my work - I consider our relationship with fruit as a necessity, a pleasure, a source of sexual innuendo, and a powerful sensory tool for evoking memory. I explore questions around the politics of consumerism and colonial influence through depictions of modern food packaging. 

I am drawn to collecting, as both a physical form of keepsake and an expression of fear at the fallible nature of memory. I am interested in how collecting casts an illusion of control and agency, offering the opportunity for completionism through a visual catalog of our daily lives. I ruminate on the mundanity of these collected objects through intricately painted repetition - becoming the sole means of production for items so concisely mass-produced. I consider the full life cycle of these ephemeral subjects, from creation to disposal, to capture an intimate portrait of the aspects of our humanity that often go unnoticed.”