Press Release - a slow burn to water by Michaela Sampas
Michaela Sampas
Title
Oil on canvas
26 x 38 inches
2026
a slow burn to water
a solo exhibition by
Michaela Sampas
Opening Saturday, July 25th at 6pm
pt.2
1523b Webster St.
Oakland, CA
pt.2 is pleased to present a slow burn to water, Michaela Sampas's first solo exhibition with the gallery.
For Michaela Sampas, painting is a way of understanding the world through the body. Walking, climbing, swimming, and moving through the Northern California landscape become forms of observation, shaping a practice rooted in both lived experience and intuition. Her paintings move fluidly between the bodily and geological, the intimate and expansive, exploring how they shape one another.
Throughout the exhibition, forms emerge, dissolve, and reconfigure. Structures resembling roots, clouds, mountains, vessels, and anatomical systems hover between recognition and abstraction. The paintings hint at diagrams, tracing relationships between the microscopic and the cosmic, the physical and the spiritual. References range from particle movement and Charles T. R. Wilson's cloud chamber experiments to botanical root system drawings, where hidden structures become visible through acts of observation and mapping. Scientific observation and intuitive knowledge coexist, allowing questions of matter, memory, and transformation to unfold simultaneously.
The exhibition's title, a slow burn to water, points toward transformation as a process rather than a fixed outcome. Across the works, bodies become landscapes and landscapes become bodies. Water shifts to steam, steam to mist, and mist gathers again. Forms emerge, dissolve, and reconfigure, lingering in moments of transition when multiple possibilities remain present at once.
This interest in transformation extends to the ways land absorbs and reflects human experience. Several works trace the impact of conflict on both bodies and landscapes, reflecting on borders, displacement, and the lingering traces of war. Here, destruction and creation are treated as forces that exist in uneasy proximity. Images that suggest bombs and births, wombs and graves, kites and planes surface throughout the exhibition, folding personal, political, and ecological histories into the same visual field. The land becomes both witness and participant, carrying evidence of what has occurred while remaining subject to its own cycles of change.
Michaela Sampas (b. 2002 San Jose) is an artist living in San Francisco, CA. Her work examines the body’s relationship to land, looking at natural forms and symbiotic processes, tantric shapes and matriarchal geometry. Through abstraction, her interest in land can expand into the transcendental, uncovering unseen connections between amorphous life forms, from micro to macro. The act of painting allows access to the innate knowledge of the body, building composition through the tension between awareness and intuition. She received her BFA in Painting and Drawing from California College of the Arts in 2025.