Samantha McCoy

Gatorland

Winner

Saturated landscape with hidden flora and fauna. Growing up in central Florida’s swiftly changing landscape largely inspired my current body of work. Changes in natural and urban scenery create a sense of whiplash in one of the fastest developing parts of the country. I have always been attracted to the flora, fauna and history of eco-tourism. When creating my work, I look to old roadside attractions such as Gatorland and local springs where the line of what is constructed and what is natural are deliberately blurred but still definable. I use paint to construct saturated memories of these places. Using a collection of cut paper, mid-century ephemera and personal photographs, I collage these ideas and images together when making a piece. Painting allows me to develop specific ideas on canvas as I go, letting the work take on a life of its own, blurring my own line of what I’m constructing and how the paint reacts to it naturally. The effects of this process show a dichotomy of an Eden like Florida dream with a sense of ecological doom. As I paint these scenes I consider how the design affects the meaning of the work. Elements like high key colors overwhelm the canvas while subtle lines throughout allude to the cut out nature of the papers I work from.