Artist Talk
Larry Sultan Visiting Artist Lecture: Sam Contis
Wednesday, March 8
7:30 p.m. PST
California College of the Arts
Timken Hall | 1111 8th Street, San Francisco, CA, 94107
Join Sam Contis on the occasion of her newest title, Overpass (Aperture, 2022), for her Larry Sultan Visiting Artist Lecture at California College of the Arts. The lecture will be followed by a book signing.
Overpass is about what it means to move through the landscape. Walking along a vast network of centuries-old footpaths through the English countryside, artist Sam Contis focuses on stiles, the simple structures that offer a means of passage over walls and fences and allow public access through privately owned land. In her immersive sequences of black-and-white photographs, they become repeating sculptural forms in the landscape, invitations to free movement on one hand and a reminder of the history of enclosure on the other. Made from wood and stone, each unique, they appear as markers pointing the way forward, or decaying and half-hidden by the undergrowth. An essay by writer Daisy Hildyard contextualizes this body of work within histories of the British landscape and contemporary ecological discourses. In an age of rising nationalism and a renewed insistence on borders, Overpass invites us to reflect on how we cross boundaries, who owns space, and the ways we have shaped the natural environment and how we might shape it in the future.
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Sam Contis (b. 1982) received her MFA from Yale University in 2008 and BFA from New York University in 2004. Her work has been exhibited widely, including at the Barbican Art Gallery, London; the Gropius-Bau, Berlin; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 2022-2023 her work was presented in solo and two-person exhibitions at Kristina Kite Gallery, Los Angeles; Carré d’Art, Nîmes; and Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York. She is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow in Photography. Contis’s work is in the permanent collections of the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the V&A, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. She is the author of Deep Springs (2017) and Day Sleeper (2020). Her new monograph, Overpass, was recently published by Aperture.
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Image: Sam Contis. Trust Exercise, 2018. Courtesy the artist and Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery.
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