Samara Golden
if earth is the brain then where is the body,
Sep 28 – Jan 12, 2025

For nearly 15 years, Los Angeles-based artist Samara Golden has been creating installations that deploy architecture and mirrors to create disquieting and disorienting environments, often populated by individuals, or traces of their presence, that have in the past spoken to experiences of violence and its aftermath, disparities of class, or illness and recovery. Her often mind-bogglingly complex installations can range from seemingly chaotic to quietly seething. Golden populates them with handmade domestic forms and textures using such materials as plastics, epoxy, and spray foam to construct a setting both familiar and ill-at-ease in its artificiality.⁠
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For her exhibition at the Nasher , Golden will create a new installation conceived for the Lower Level Gallery—a room fronted by windows, approached from a descending staircase. Visitors entering the gallery will encounter a seemingly infinite and fantastic space evoking cascading pools, ranging from the fetid to the paradisical—a place where memories, emotions, and possibilities converge. Within an environment constructed from converging mirrors, smaller-scale handmade elements populate realms that evoke sensations associated with water and waves, whether the oceanic reaches of the subconscious, the possibility of floating, suspended, as if in utero, or the enclosing depths that conjure the terror of drowning.⁠