Opening on Friday, November 4, 6 – 9 pm
In Conversation: Sam Falls and Attilia Fattori Franchini
Friday, November 4, 7 – 8 pm
Galerie Eva Presenhuber is pleased to announce Sam Falls’s seventh solo exhibition at the gallery and is proud to present his work in Vienna for the first time. Concerned with the intimacy of time, the illustration of place, and exploration of mortality, Sam Falls has created his own formal language by intertwining photography’s core parameters of time and exposure with nature and her elements. Working largely outdoors with vernacular materials and nature as a site-specific subject, Falls abandons mechanical reproduction in favor of a more symbiotic relationship between subject and object. In doing so, he bridges the gap between photography, sculpture, and painting, as well as the divide between artist, object, and viewer.
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I became an artist in the pursuit of freedom, to be alone and free. For the same reason I left my studio to work outdoors a long time ago - to have new experiences and engage wholly with nature and the environment. Outdoors things are never the same - the flowers blossom and die, the sun comes and goes, the seasons change. Since I was young I’ve felt haunted by time and mortality, not a fear of my own death, but an anxiety for losing those close to me. Working through nature has helped me abstract the quotidian quality of time into a larger productive metaphor that becomes cyclical rather than finite. Working through the night in the rain into the sunrise, or watching spring return from the winter, I’ve embraced a sublime melancholy that I believe is both inescapable and productive. Working alone for days at a time in the forest, I’ve become intimately connected to the landscapes around me and this fear of mortality has translated to environmentalism. Our society has become a psychopomp shuttling great swaths of land to their death, the Charon in my painting is not carrying a person across the Rivers Styx but rather native flowers from New York that are dwindling in number every year due to climate change. The polaroid photos of plants freeze in the height of their brief existence as spring enters summer and then later as autumn begins and the flowers die I trim them and roll them into wet clay that preserves their bodies as fossilized forms turned to stone, framing their youth. The large format polaroid film is dead-stock from an obsolete art-form that mirrors society’s irreverent depletion of natural resources: something so perfect and beautiful as nature is used and depleted until it must be replaced by a new technology that lacks the original spirit.
