Exhibitions

Salon Highlight: Sam Diesnt

January 15 - March 3, 2022

Featured Artwork

Louis Buhl & Co. presents our latest Salon Highlight installment featuring a series of unique tapestry weavings and sculptures by Detroit-based artist Sam Dienst. Using contiguous and intersecting outlines and unconventional color combinations, Dienst explores how our perceptions and experiences are multifaceted and complex. Any given moment is understood through a combination of our physical senses and our subjective realities. By blurring boundaries between objects and materials, she hopes to heighten our understanding of what it means to exist in time and space, and the flux between moments of understanding.

Dienst’s work focuses on deconstructing and reconstructing her environments through a combination of sculptures, drawings, and tapestry weavings. With the colorful and poppy nature of her weavings, it’s surprising to learn the basic and mundane nature of the objects that inform their compositions; from empty grocery store sushi boxes to a folding chair in her studio, Dienst finds endless inspiration in her daily surroundings. Upon her graduation from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in the Spring of 2021, the artist moved to Southwest Detroit, an area relatively unfamiliar to her prior. The featured works reflect Dienst’s explorations around the new neighborhood, dialing in on particular forms that caught her attention, such as a dumpster, a trash shoot, a pothole, and a discarded sofa amongst others.

Once Dienst gathers her references, she constructs the forms into soft sculptures made out of felt and paint; some of the sculptures are directly observational, some are a compilation between observation and imagination, and others are completely fictitious. The sculptures are then photographed and transferred to her computer, where she digitally renders the works into various arrangements in order to determine the overall compositions of her weavings. Through this process, a great deal of realistic representation is lost—scale is often disregarded, and vibrant, saturated colors are introduced. Certain characteristics of the objects are hyperbolized and blown out of proportion, while other, less conspicuous details from Dienst’s perspective are stripped away. The whimsical abstraction that results offers a playful and captivating viewer experience; a level of ambiguity and subjectivity exists, but still, original sources of inspiration can be uncovered through further investigation, prompting an entirely new perspective of the work—almost as if the piece is being viewed for the first time all over again. A grouping of Dienst’s soft sculptures complement the tapestry works, offering a unique and dimensional glimpse into the artist’s mind and process of creation.

Salon Highlight: Sam Dienst is on view from January 15 through March 3, 2022.