Friends Sam Walker and Chloe Summerhayes began their collaborative painting project in 2022, exchanging works they considered ‘failures’ or ‘unresolved’. Working within a shared understanding of ownership and authorship, each artist was free to intervene in and transform the other’s paintings. The project culminated in the exhibition The Same Coin in 2025.
Through paint and gesture, their exchange has produced a dialogue that merges two distinct voices into a series of uncanny compositions that are sometimes playful and at times unsettling. Their interests in liminal space and intuitive response echo throughout the collaboration, with forms and fragments drifting between states of presence. Unfolding across a rich palette, the paintings blur and bleed from one image to the next in free conversation.
Hotel California extends the original collaboration through a contextual reframing of selected works by curators Susanna Bauer and Bree Linden Smith, themselves colleagues and long-time friends. This expanded collaboration further examines the rules of engagement that shape creative and gallery relationships. The act of reframing is as spatial as it is conceptual. Visitors navigate shifting suggestions of architecture, passing through openings and screened corners that simultaneously reveal and conceal. Part hotel, part Salon des Refusés, the exhibition becomes a space for behind-the-scenes conversations and a platform for agency and access through convivial networking.
Sam Walker and Chloe Summerhayes are Ĺtautahi-based artists who met while studying at Ilam School of Fine Arts, where both completed Master of Fine Arts degrees. Summerhayes is represented by Suite Gallery, while Walker was among the artists selected for Soundings at Nine Fathom Deep. Both keep active practices, showing nationally in solo and group exhibitions. Susanna Bauer and Bree Linden Smith are art professionals living in Te Whanganui-a-Tara who first met at Massey University School of Fine Arts.
