Artist Bio
Samantha Hayslett is an emerging Boston based artist originally from southern Connecticut. She got her BS at Ursinus College in mathematics in 2019, and graduated from Boston University with an MFA in painting in 2026. Her work predominantly used windows as a source of inspiration revolving around points of contrast, and the uncanny aspects of the everyday. Her work has been on view in multiple solo and group shows including ones at Morgan Lehman Gallery in New York, Stone Gallery in Boston, Perspectives Gallery in Hamden, Ely Center of Contemporary Art in New Haven, and Lyme Academy of Fine Arts in Old Lyme.
Artist Statement
My windows are not real. They are part memory, part dimension, part reality. I think of them as somewhere between film stills and the ideal of a specific window. They are not realistic depictions. They are abstractions of the observed world.
Windows, for me, are about contrast: glossy versus matte, space versus flatness, solid light versus black voids. Starting with a familiar form allows me to play more openly with these contrasting ideas. In my paintings, I have been changing lines, affecting saturation, removing detail, and deepening blacks all to see how far I can push the image before it deviates completely from the source material.
The Uncanny has been a major source for most, if not all, of these paintings. I have been trying to pinpoint the moment after the familiar realistic window is lost but before the image completely dissolves into unreality.
Right now the Uncanny feels like the most real thing to paint.