Point Reyes Books Hosts Sam Contis and Chris Jennings in Conversation

Point Reyes Presbyterian Church, 11445 CA-1, Point Reyes Station

Join Aperture and Point Reyes Books for a conversation between artist Sam Contis and author Chris Jennings, celebrating Contis’s title Overpass (Aperture, 2022). 

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.

This event is presented in partnership with Point Reyes Books. 

—

Sam Contis (b. 1982) lives in California. Her work has been exhibited widely, including at the Barbican Centre, London; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Carré d’Art, Nîmes, France; and MoMA, New York. She is the recipient of a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship and the author of Deep Springs (2017) and Day Sleeper (2020). 

Chris Jennings is the author of Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism (2016). His writing has appeared in Aperture, the New York Times, the New Republic, the Wall Street Journal, newyorker.com, and elsewhere. He is currently writing a book about the 1992 siege at Ruby Ridge, to be published by Little, Brown and Company. He lives in Inverness, California.

—

Image: Image from Sam Contis: Overpass (Aperture 2022). © 2022 Sam Contis