Samara Golden's works take the form of immersive installations, environments capable of modifying the perception of space. To do this, she uses illusion (transparency of glass, combined with the reflections of mirrors...) to modify or extend physical space and create what she calls impossible or illusory spaces: places that remain inaccessible in real life, but that the viewer perceives as being able to be.

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The elusive part of her installations is the disturbance they create in our understanding of space. The viewer has the sensation that the space can extend in all directions, suggesting the existence of adjacent rooms that ultimately do not exist.

 

In her installations the human presence is simply suggested, by an abundance of everyday objects, tangled furniture, interiors of apartments that seem to have been abandoned, deserted in a hurry (spilled objects, unfinished meals ...). Sometimes the human presence takes the form of figurines, staged in more or less understandable postures, reinforcing the feeling of drama that is being played out and of diffuse tensions.

But no scenario is really definable, Samara Golden applies herself to develop an imagery that is neither narrative nor abstract, but still recognizable by subtly referring to a commonly shared visual universe.

A feeling of emptiness, of vertigo, seizes the viewer in front of this disturbing absence. This emptiness then becomes the receptacle of its own projections. Behind a very present formalism, the artist establishes a very strong relationship to life and its vulnerability. Her installations combine the real and the unreal to create a mental space or a psychological space.

Through her installations, Samara Golden translates the complexity of human existence in the 21st century.

These illusory spaces function as a metaphor for a psychological state, reflecting a state of internal struggle, personal devastation or sadness. In this, his works represent a troubling polarity between empathy and distance, between contemplation and disaster.

Often in her work, projects are born from personal experiences and not from concepts. Thus, for the project she wishes to develop at the Atelier Calder, the artist relies on a process of experimentation carried out throughout her residency using different materials.  For this project, Samara Golden wishes to introduce more reality, this experience will allow her to render emotions and feelings at the time they were created.

 

Samara Golden was born in 1973, (Michigan, USA) she lives and works in Los Angeles, she graduated (MFA) from Columbia University (New York). Her installations have been shown recently in the group exhibition "Psyche als Schauplatz des Politischen" at the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Baden Baden, Germany (2019), "Upstairs at Steve's" at The Fabric Workshop & Museum in Philadelphia (2021).

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Her work has been exhibited at MoMA/PS1 in New York during the Whitney Biennial, and at the Hammer Museum & MOCA in Les Angeles, Zabludowicz Collection in London and Yuz Museum in Shanghai. Her work is included in the collections of the Museum of American Art, Whitney, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Zabludowicz Collection, London, Yuz Museum, Shanghai.

 

 

More information on Samara Golden https://samaragolden.com/home.html

                                                           

 https://www.nightgallery.ca/artists/samara-golden

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