Born in Brooklyn and based today in Los Angeles, Samantha Roth earned her BFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 2003 and her MFA from the University of Southern California in 2010. Roth has exhibited throughout Los Angeles and was a selected visiting artist at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 2010. Known for recent work in colored pencil on black gessoed paper, Roth creates otherworldly renderings of recognizable forms. With vast swathes of darkness reminiscent of ancient Greek red-figure pottery, she takes advantage of the visually inverted qualities of her technique to provoke questions about the true nature of depth and space, form and density. Some of her most striking work features interior scenes depicted in such a novel way as to make the familiar seem alien, prompting the viewer to question the primacy assumed by that which they can see and touch over what else may be present, unseen beneath the surface.