Artist Spotlight: Samantha Wendel

If a more slighted art form exists than that of show flyers my heart goes out to those creating it. Outside of a very tight-nit circle of awareness, impacting and sustaining our communities social cohesion is done anonymously. Show flyer creation is a selfless act. We all too often come in contact with those flyers designed begrudgingly out of necessity, using rote formats, uninspired fonts, and regurgitated structures, the moment we cross paths with those bred out of passion the whole future they are promoting stamps us with importance. Samantha Wendel is one of the greats. It is impossible not to taste her personality in her work yet at the same time she seems so far removed from it; as with the often cryptic dimensions of her most ambitious pieces, Wendel’s being hides there secretly to be seen only if one feels driven to invest the energy to stare passionately into the abyss of her creativity.

When asked about the process behind her work, “my designs have always been very typography heavy but lately I’ve been working a lot with photography as a basis for design inspiration. Using everything from Bauhaus photography and CB radio cards to more traditional psychedelic inspired elements. I like trying to form connections between a mix of random and seemingly unconnected things. It’s often chaotic visually but I enjoy presenting something that you can find new elements in the longer you look at. Designs where you may not be totally certain what’s going on at first but you find a face in the corner and that face leads you to some hidden text and that draws your eye to the band names, etc… I like to ‘hide’ things within a design. Often something that pertains only to me or my current mood while I was working on the design but it’s sort of fun to see how people interpret those different elements for themselves.”