Samala Meza

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA

Artist statement

Samala Meza (b. 1996, Santa Rosa, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She received a BFA from Otis College of Art and Design. Meza combines a formal interest in geometric abstraction with an emotional fixation on the female figure. Influenced by the graphic sensibilities of Lora Lamm, Herbert Bayer and Erberto Carboni, she returns to the color field with criticality, using simplified forms, repetition, and saturated fields of color to examine how images acquire cultural meaning. Her paintings draw on the visual language of advertising, where color, composition, and the suggestion of sexuality are used to make bodies and desires into symbols. Meza’s figures are constructed from soft, hazy patches of paint that reduce the body to an arrangement of forms and openings, depicting the female body as a highly charged symbol of desire. She uses the figure not simply to depict women but to examine how women become images. Her work refers to the visual environment shaped by television, billboards, tabloids, and social media, where images seduce as much as they instruct us how to look. Meza examines the ways symbols become embedded in our collective consciousness. Her use of the color field introduces a tension between the repetition of a minimalist figure and the overstimulated visual environment of contemporary culture. In dialogue with Helen Frankenthaler and Mark Rothko, Meza treats color as both autonomous form and a vehicle for cultural association, drawing on its capacity...

Artwork