This post was originally published on artnews.com
“I’m always interested in an antagonistic female,” said Samantha Joy Groff, whose paintings are situated in and inspired by the rural southeastern Pennsylvania landscape in which she grew up. “The rural woman has been historically used as a caricature in popular culture, as hypersexualized, domineering, roaming.”
Recalling her early exposure to classic American landscape painters such as Andrew Wyeth and Grant Wood, Groff always questioned the lack of leisurely women and the bleak, muted hues of the environments they rendered. For her part, Groff offers a more vibrant look at everything, including what contemporary women can be in the pastoral setting she calls home.
Placing women in the role of the hunter, Groff reimagined the classic mythology of the goddess Diana who, according to legend, turned a man into a deer for having seen her naked. Adorned in ribbons and fur, Groff’s women pose together with animals in nature, often in sexually suggestive scenarios. With a playful touch and a light choke, her work turns traditional notions of hunter and prey on their head.
Groff’s elaborately constructed scenes offer compelling melodrama that is perhaps best understood through her sense of staging. With a background in costume design and film, she photographs friends and family as subjects for her paintings. For her elaborate shoots, Groff makes costumes, scouts locations, and choreographs poses.
Her latest paintings follow an equally performative process in the service of exploring modern-day exorcisms. Having grown up both Pennsylvania Dutch and Mennonite, Groff depicts one of the oldest folk magic practices in America: Braucherei, as it is called by the Pennsylvania Dutch, is a prayer and healing ritual intended to banish demons. Paintings such as Dark Pasture Encounter: Conduit (2023) and Night Prey, or (The Prey of the Terrible shall be Delivered), 2024, evoke the ecstatic, almost erotic experience of the divine.
Groff said she is interested in displays of vulnerability and desire that can be found in the ritual practice of “putting hands on someone and praying,” while simultaneously “trying to conjure something out of somebody.” Improbable poses, struck by working behind the scenes with contortionists, only heighten the palpable tension extended through an unusual use of taxidermy and foreboding landscapes that beg for a moment of release.
Though Groff’s work eschews the political, her paintings capture a distinctly American ethos rooted in the present day: the struggle between the old and the new found in the freedom of the open landscape and the struggle for bodily autonomy. In her orchestrated scenes, Groff pushes the limits of what feels physically possible. Whether one is a viewer or an active participant, one thing is certain: “there’s a dynamic,” Groff explained, to “organizing bodies in a space where no one’s really neutral.”