Connie Samaras: Tales of Tomorrow
Armory Center for the Arts, Maryland, Pasadena, 03/01/2013 - 06/09/2013
ABOUT
Over the past two decades, Connie Samaras has used photography and video to represent particular built environments she characterizes as “speculative landscapes” against the backdrop of daily life. She explores the aspirations and anxieties of the imagined future – how the US dreams itself – along with the psychological and social dislocation within the everyday.
Samaras reveals the paradoxes of these surreal environments – vast, impersonal constructions such as the cities of Las Vegas and Dubai and the remote, scientific colonies of the South Pole or Spaceport America, an emerging corporate space launch facility in the remote desert of New Mexico. Her objective is to unhinge the speculative from the normative and thus illuminate the multiple timelines and social possibilities – the rich subjectivity – in any given moment of daily life. Works from six completed series will be presented – Angelic States-Event Sequence, After the American Century, V.A.L.I.S. (Vast Action Living Intelligence System), and Spaceport America – as well as works from the ongoing series Surface Events. Collectively, the works in Tales of Tomorrow address the social and economic construction of “future imaginaries” and the variable membrane between fiction and real world.
In addition to featuring works from the six series noted above, this survey exhibition debuts Edge of Twilight, new photography from the first part of an expansive trilogy that launches a conceptual turn in Samaras’ work. Historically the artist’s projects, such as those shot in Dubai and South Pole, depict the future imaginaries of global capitalism, or how the future is held out as a singular probability. Edge of Twilight looks at humble and everyday future imaginaries inflected by social change movements, in which the future is seen as a series of shifting possibilities. Featuring photographs of homes in a women’s retirement RV park in the desert of the U.S. southwest, Edge of Twilight borrows from the genres of time travel and tourism literature as way to reconsider the intersecting complexity of marginalized, cross-generational personal experience and political histories. The long exposures of the photographs and the vapor light under which they were shot create an enigmatic environment in which black skies and yellow RVs are punctuated by the vivid colors of rainbow flags.
For More Information
MORE EXHIBITIONS
Group exhibition
Armory Center for the Arts
Group exhibition
Armory Center for the Arts
Solo exhibition
Pacific Asia Museum
Solo exhibition
Pasadena Museum of California Art
Solo exhibition
Armory Center for the Arts
Group exhibition
Armory Center for the Arts
Group exhibition
Armory Center for the Arts
Solo exhibition
Armory Center for the Arts
Solo exhibition
Armory Center for the Arts
Solo exhibition
Armory Center for the Arts
Solo exhibition
Armory Center for the Arts
Solo exhibition
Phoenix Art Museum
Group exhibition
Armory Center for the Arts
Group exhibition
Armory Center for the Arts
Solo exhibition
Pacific Asia Museum
Solo exhibition
Pasadena Museum of California Art
Solo exhibition
Alyce De Roulet Williamson Gallery, Art ...
Solo exhibition
Armory Center for the Arts
Group exhibition
Pacific Asia Museum
Over the past two decades, Connie Samaras has used photography and video to represent particular built environments she characterizes as “speculative landscapes” against the backdrop of daily life. She explores the aspirations and anxieties of the imagined future – how the US dreams itself – along with the psychological and social dislocation within the everyday.
Samaras reveals the paradoxes of these surreal environments – vast, impersonal constructions such as the cities of Las Vegas and Dubai and the remote, scientific colonies of the South Pole or Spaceport America, an emerging corporate space launch facility in the remote desert of New Mexico. Her objective is to unhinge the speculative from the normative and thus illuminate the multiple timelines and social possibilities – the rich subjectivity – in any given moment of daily life. Works from six completed series will be presented – Angelic States-Event Sequence, After the American Century, V.A.L.I.S. (Vast Action Living Intelligence System), and Spaceport America – as well as works from the ongoing series Surface Events. Collectively, the works in Tales of Tomorrow address the social and economic construction of “future imaginaries” and the variable membrane between fiction and real world.
In addition to featuring works from the six series noted above, this survey exhibition debuts Edge of Twilight, new photography from the first part of an expansive trilogy that launches a conceptual turn in Samaras’ work. Historically the artist’s projects, such as those shot in Dubai and South Pole, depict the future imaginaries of global capitalism, or how the future is held out as a singular probability. Edge of Twilight looks at humble and everyday future imaginaries inflected by social change movements, in which the future is seen as a series of shifting possibilities. Featuring photographs of homes in a women’s retirement RV park in the desert of the U.S. southwest, Edge of Twilight borrows from the genres of time travel and tourism literature as way to reconsider the intersecting complexity of marginalized, cross-generational personal experience and political histories. The long exposures of the photographs and the vapor light under which they were shot create an enigmatic environment in which black skies and yellow RVs are punctuated by the vivid colors of rainbow flags.
For More Information