Sam Falls: Cross Country (driving, flying, listening)

About

This new work by Sam Falls, a self-described itinerant American artist who passed through New York last Spring to speak about Robert Irwin at Dia Center for the Arts and sign books at Printed Matter in Chelsea, returns this Fall to install his exhibition at OSMOS in the East Village, as well as a gallery show at Eva Presenhuber in NoHo. Both open Friday, September 8, 2017.  

Composed of 3 video projections, Cross Country (driving, flying, listening), recreates the experience of recollection, a cogent narrative that refuses to be a story, instead allowing us to liberate the simulations. Certainly what we see and what we hear is real –- it’s all real, as it was recorded, but what it says is another matter. The matter of a meaningful experience is what we bring to it.

In the artist’s words: When I was five in 1989 my mom packed up our red Subaru wagon and we drove across the country, from California to Vermont. I don’t remember much: I remember waving goodbye to my dad and everybody crying but me, I remember seeing snow for the first time, probably as we passed through the Rockies. I remember noticing bats at dusk and thinking they were all bloodsuckers. I remember hearing an owl’s “who-who” like a ghost in the woods, unsuspecting how permanent my shift from urban life to rural was about to become. Most of all though I remember laying in the back seat watching the telephone and power lines run like two jump ropes as they swung pole to pole parallel to the road. Watching the lines move was mesmerizing and consistent - it was comforting - it unified the vast country I was traversing for the first time like a string tied to my finger to lead me back home. The literal metaphor of phone lines connecting people is true, but just the physical presence of the lines all the way in Vermont, where everything looked and felt different, was strangely important - that I at least recognized something - I wasn’t totally lost.

This exhibition is the last in a year-long series that looks back to the 20 years OSMOS has been in existence. It also marks a new chapter for OSMOS as Sam Falls was the first artist-in-residence at OSMOS Station, a new extension of OSMOS in the Catskills.  

Sam Falls was born in 1984 in San Diego, CA. He had solo exhibitions at the Public Art Fund in New York, NY (2014), at Pomona College, CA (2014), at the Ballroom Marfa, TX (2015), The Kitchen, New York (2015) and the Giuliani Foundation, Rome, Italy (2015), Hannah Hoffmann Gallery Los Angeles (2016). In Spring 2018 Sam Falls will have a solo exhibition at MART Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea di Trento, Italy.