Pieces from Samantha DiRosa's body of work Gathering Dust: Sediment/Sentiment were recently included in two exhibitions on environmental art, Biotics Semiotics (Allen Priebe Art Gallery, University of Wisconsin) and Flora/Fauna (The Fine Arts Center of Hot Spring, AR).
Gathering Dust: Sediment/Sentiment is a hybrid-media project that explores layered narratives regarding geology, memory, and human occupation of the landscape. Inspired by the study of landforms (geomorphology), the project extends the language of science to examine how people inhabit and are products of landscape processes. The project uses the concept of sedimentation to explore issues of sentimentality. In linking sediment and sentiment, the project extends the language of science to examine how people inhabit and are products of landscape processes. By extending geomorphological concepts to the realm of human emotion, text, images, and objects become catalysts for looking at how scientific constructions might be more profoundly understood in terms of human experience, and vice versa. This project is a collaboration with landscape theorist and poet Jolie B. Kaytes, associate professor of Landscape Architecture at Washington State University.