Samara Golden
A Fall of Corners, Sep 12 – Oct 25, 2015

To help celebrate this gallery’s 16th season we open our doors to a new installation by Los Angeles based artist Samara Golden. Ms Golden is a Michigan native. She was schooled at the Minneapolis College of Art and Columbia University. We met her several years ago through the kind hospitality of Night Gallery, her L.A affiliate.

Samara Golden’s objects roost in ways that sculpture shouldn’t. Built up and carved from 4x8 sheets of silver insulation board, then petrified with a slathering of epoxy resin, these tough flyweight chunks of handmade simulacra are her core constructions. Hung on an armature of bird bones, things fit where they need to. Suspended from hardly disguised strings and wires, stuff gets pinned up and down and over. Her sculpture can encrust itself to any axis. It is free to float.

Ms. Golden is a busy, nearly maniacal orchestrator of space and stuff. Her big silvery worlds are engineered, usually from the ceiling down. In A Fall of Corners, there is a renewed disconnect from gravity, the room is upended, sideways, and re-angled by a plushly carpeted catwalk. The gallery space gets spun like a wheel and falls apart into a kaleidoscope of views and points of view, folding space into sharply rendered scenes that spread out across each wall. (In this case a country restaurant from the 1980’s, a wedding reception?, a hotel lobby and an apartment/bachelor pad equipped with exercise bike). Each of these set pieces is doubled through a sheet of mirror that spans the entire floor of the gallery. The effect is a kind of vertigo that can’t be measured with a stick.

As immersive as a cave and as personal as an underwear drawer, Golden’s handmade world seems to sample a combination of banal architecture and personal memory. Architecture as the envelope for our private lives is what Ms. Golden’s creations lock into. Flying over these places is a kind of magic that’s reserved for dreams and crane shots. Golden is in the business of making new realities come true, these are not in camera tricks or CGI, this all exists in real blood time. Whole scenes cascade upon the viewer in a monstrous group hallucination leaving one asking Where am I? Are you seeing this? Am I having a migraine or did someone slip something in my drink?

From motion sickness to deja vu, Golden builds an art that disconnects eyes from mind and body. Perspectives are forced on the viewer like a collapsing building. I am reminded of Conical Intersect or Circus, those late Matta Clark works that shred perspectives on what used to be familiar, where the best photos defy any clear sense of orientation, only a ghost of place is left intact. With Golden there is no wrecking ball, the cuts are domesticated. Cups and saucers remain undisturbed, not one chair gets overturned. Perhaps in the end she is closer to some sort of space aged Kienholz for Golden’s things are life-size models of our feelings first and our architecture second.

There are moments when I am in this room that I lose more than myself. I stand dumbstruck in this thing wondering about bats and dolphins. Echo location comes to mind. Am I missing some inner equipment? In place of thoughts and words there are only feelings and sensations; heartbreak, regret, longing and fondness for the places and missing people of this world, and my own life. Abstraction at its best. The gears are freed up, spinning, sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly, I am just along for the ride. This is dislocation times one thousand and I for one am grateful for the break from myself.

Samara Golden, b. 1973, Ann Arbor, Michigan, has been featured in solo exhibitions at MoMA PS1, New York, Night Gallery, Los Angeles, and Frieze Projects, New York. Group exhibitions include MOCA, Los Angeles, Sculpture Center, New York, Zabludowicz Collection, London, and The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Golden will present a solo exhibition at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco in March 2016. She is represented by Night Gallery, Los Angeles, and CANADA, New York.

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