SAM BRANDEN: DOGBANE

CHART is pleased to present DOGBANE, a solo show of new hand-sewn works and site-specific installations by Sam Branden. The exhibition marks the artist’s solo debut in New York, and his second collaboration with the gallery. The show will open on Friday, October 25th, with a reception from 6–8pm, and remain on view through Friday, December 20th.

Urban life, specifically navigating and surviving the boroughs of New York City, has long fascinated Branden, who has roots in street fashion and graffiti culture. Simultaneously, the artist originally hails from the Midwest, with his formative years spent immersed in the splendor of the natural world. This dichotomy of influence is central to the metaphorical underpinnings of DOGBANE, which takes its title from the fibrous flowering shrub whose stems can be used to make rope and thread but is also notorious for poisoning surrounding wildlife.

For the Brooklyn-based Branden, this ubiquitous and unassuming plant parallels his own present position on the city, which to him feels perpetually overgrown, and also malleable, useful, and potentially hazardous. Having absorbed and internalized the expressions of New York City for well on a decade, the artist has learned to transmute the unpredictable rhythms of the urban cacophony into artistic inspiration, reacting subconsciously when assembling his fabric-forward paintings.

Created from deconstructed and hand-sewn elements, these new works incorporate found objects from the artist’s neighborhood—unstrung detritus, orphaned work gloves, stripped subway advertisements, an embroidered logo patch—both reacting to and formally subsuming these environmental stimuli. Branden’s paintings are full of bright pops of colliding colors, again mirroring the kaleidoscopic visual potpourri of New York, with tracks of thread coursing across the canvases demarcating textural shifts and conjoining disparate swaths not unlike thoroughfares crisscrossing a city’s street map.

In addition to the focus on capturing the consistency and character of lived experience with rugged raw canvas and jagged seams, Branden’s incorporation of spandex as a structural material also serves an allegorical purpose for the artist, acting as a way to express the synthetic or superficial elements of contemporary life. This shimmering elastic fabric appears to constantly be in flux, and when employed by Branden, looks to be grasping and clinging to the edges of things, stretching too thin to its maximum limit.

DOGBANE also features examples of spandex protruding beyond its standard structural supports, with both a site-specific “splay”—how the artist refers to his creeping, pinioned fabric sculptures—running up the wall of a corner of the gallery, as well as a new sculptural work that sees the material continue protruding past the edges of the stretcher bar and out onto the space surrounding it. Reflecting the sexier side of the city’s grit and grime, the spandex expresses fleeting, ethereal flashes, while also rendering and cloaking structural forms. Even as it holds a pose, the material visually suggests a certain kinetic potency, an aesthetic agent about to snap, to split, to bloom.

About the Artist

Sam Branden (b. 1991, Cleveland, OH) received his BFA from the Columbus College of Art & Design in 2014. Solo exhibitions include Stowaway Gallery, Los Angeles; Beverly’s, New York, NY; and the Art Academy of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH. Group shows include CHART, New York; darkZone, New Jersey; PRP Agency, Dallas, TX; Pangeé, Montréal, QC; and Bible Gallery, New York, NY; among others. Branden was recently included in “Who’s Who?” New York City edition (sponsored by Puma and Newco Studio, 2023), a hard-backed publication highlighting 75 notable downtown creatives. Branden lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.