Moving Landscape holds work over a 12-year period, tracking artist, Sam Contis’ photographic journey through three bodies of work—Deep Springs, Overpass and Cross Country.
Contis is a US-based visual artist working in photography and moving image. Recent shows include a 2022 early-career survey, Transit, at the Carré d’Art in Nîmes, and a collaboration, Duet, with the vocalist Inbal Hever at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York. Her work has been shown in group exhibitions at the Barbican Art Gallery, the Gropius-Bau, Carnegie Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art.
The three bodies:
Deep Springs, set amongst the desert along the California-Nevada border, references mythology through the iconography of the American cowboy. Eschewing what is a common conception of masculinity, the work “merges” the “body and earth”. Overpass, transports the audience from dusty terrain to public footpaths across the English landscape, venturing away from the “traditional genre of landscape photography.” With Cross Country taking us back to the US through the Pennsylvania countryside focusing on a team of high school runners training, tracking the transformation of skin, sweat and the body, moving through the air.
Curator, Dr Anna Arabindan-Kesson says, “From these intersections, she [Contis] interrogates meanings we hold about gender, examines practices of place-making, and attends to the processes of becoming that shape how, and with whom, we identify.”
View in pictures, a journey across photographic technique, subject matter and landscape.
Sam Contis, Clover, 2019/2021, silver gelatin print, 101.6 x 152.4 cm (image) Courtesy of the artist © Sam Contis.
Sam Contis, Dark Wood, 2018/2024, silver gelatin print, 22.9 x 15.2 cm (image) Courtesy of the artist © Sam Contis.
Sam Contis, Dust in the Road, 2014, silver gelatin print, 86.4 x 106.7 cm (image) Courtesy of the artist © Sam Contis.
Sam Contis, Finding the Line, 2015, silver gelatin print, 76.2 x 61 cm (image) Courtesy of the artist © Sam Contis.
Sam Contis, Junction, 2015, silver gelatin print, 76.2 x 61 cm (image) Courtesy of the artist © Sam Contis.
Sam Contis, Untitled (from the series Overpass), 2020-2022, silver gelatin print, 22 x 14.5 cm each (image) Courtesy of the artist © Sam Contis.
Sam Contis: Moving Landscape
Art Gallery of Western Australia
On now—28 September
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