“More, More, More!” Swimming in Opulence with Samantha Nye

AMANTHA NYE works primarily in painting and video, but she experiments with a wide range of media.Her work considers lesbian sexuality, beauty and sex in aging, the politics of opulence, and the ongoing resonances of midcentury U.S. visual culture, among other concerns.Her video project Visual Pleasure/Jukebox Cinema (2013-ongoing) engages in a surreal recapitulation of the Scopitone films, the 16mm jukebox predecessors of the music video.I met NYE for a studio visit in May 2024 to discuss her influences and view a selection of her paintings for my dissertation on bathers and bathing in contemporary queer and trans art.In her painting project Attractive People Doing Attractive Things in Attractive Places (2018-ongoing), NYE restages photographer SLIM AARONS'S glamorous images of upscale swimming pools and lawns as settings for painted scenes of age-, race-, and size-inclusive lesbian eroticism.The opulent swimming pool and garden party milieux and the very title of the series borrow from AARONS, who photographed "attractive people who were doing attractive things in attractive places" (his words) for Harper's Bazaar, Life, Town & Country, and Holiday, and photo-books of his own, like A Wonderful Time: An Intimate Portrait of the Good Life (1974).