Involved with the intimacy of time, the illustration of place, and exploration of mortality, Sam Falls has created his personal formal language by intertwining images’s core parameters of time and publicity with nature and her components. Working largely outdoor with vernacular supplies and nature as a site-specific topic, Falls abandons mechanical replica in favor of a extra symbiotic relationship between topic and object. In doing so, he bridges the hole between images, sculpture, and portray, in addition to the divide between artist, object, and viewer.

I turned an artist within the pursuit of freedom, to be alone and free. For a similar cause I left my studio to work outdoor a very long time in the past—to have new experiences and have interaction wholly with nature and the atmosphere. Outside issues are by no means the identical—the flowers blossom and die, the solar comes and goes, the seasons change. Since I used to be younger I’ve felt haunted by time and mortality, not a concern of my very own loss of life, however an anxiousness for shedding these near me. Working via nature has helped me summary the quotidian high quality of time into a bigger productive metaphor that turns into cyclical moderately than finite. Working via the night time within the rain into the dawn, or watching spring return from the winter, I’ve embraced a chic melancholy that I consider is each inescapable and productive. Working alone for days at a time within the forest, I’ve turn into intimately linked to the landscapes round me and this concern of mortality has translated to environmentalism. Our society has turn into a psychopomp shuttling nice swaths of land to their loss of life, the Charon in my portray is just not carrying an individual throughout the Rivers Styx however moderately native flowers from New York which might be dwindling in quantity yearly because of local weather change. The polaroid pictures of crops freeze within the peak of their transient existence as spring enters summer time after which later as autumn begins and the flowers die I trim them and roll them into moist clay that preserves their our bodies as fossilized varieties turned to stone, framing their youth. The massive format polaroid movie is dead-stock from an out of date art-form that mirrors society’s irreverent depletion of pure assets: one thing so good and exquisite as nature is used and depleted till it should be changed by a brand new know-how that lacks the unique spirit.

In fact the reciprocal can be true, whereas the metaphor for environmentalism grows in my work, so does an abounding hope to share our human connection to nature and rejoice the lifetime of each. My work has developed from a constant engagement with nature in numerous landscapes and an intimacy with crops and the environment—there’s a sure purity to working outdoor that I can’t describe however hope to narrate via the artworks. I wish to encourage this interplay within the viewer and subtract my very own presence: each individual has their very own connection to nature and the perfect is to have this summoned up and explored independently. Certainly one of my favourite texts is “Nature” by Ralph Waldo Emerson wherein he factors to the inherent capability for nature to show us not solely about ourselves however the bigger existential questions that every one individuals encounter.

As Emerson states, “Each man’s situation is an answer in hieroglyphic to these inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, earlier than he apprehends it as reality. In like method, nature is already, in its varieties and tendencies, describing its personal design. Allow us to interrogate the nice apparition, that shines so peacefully round us. Allow us to inquire, to what finish is nature?”

My objective is to not replicate nature with artwork, however moderately create a major supply that’s engaged with the panorama in addition to time. As a result of these works are made with humidity and precipitation on the time of their creation, they work together with each the environment and crops of a given season, the identical approach that we do. Together with this, I’ve all the time been very emotionally vulnerable to the altering seasons, both in-tune with the enjoyment of spring or sufferer of the melancholy of autumn. I attempt to depart my private life out of the work but it surely comes via in methods I don’t anticipate, resonating with time moderately than decoding it ideally. My environmentalist qualities spiked upon having youngsters for apparent causes, but additionally it enhanced my emotional relationship to nature and time. For the primary time I’ve turn into involved for my very own mortality, however not for shedding my very own life however for lacking theirs. My relationship to time has reformed as soon as once more and brought on a brand new dimension that presents itself in my work freshly and surprisingly even to myself. The way in which youngsters’s personalities appear to come back absolutely fashioned and impartial from their dad and mom appears to me the identical approach climate meets us within the morning and not too long ago how a few of my artworks come into being. The perennial pleasure and unhappiness of a flower within the backyard from spring to fall is the every day existential magnificence and ache of growing older with any cherished one. I do know I can’t cease time, however once I’m out working alone nature slowly jogs my memory that I’m the one factor within the forest who even is aware of it exists. . .

Sam Falls

at Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Vienna
till December 22, 2022