Sam Anderson
Working predominately in small-scale sculptures and film, Anderson investigates the urge to create narratives and meaning, and the failure of objects to fulfill this demand. Primarily figurative, the work scrutinizes the psychology of compartmentalization, the placement of value in obscurity, and the mourning of customs and acquired skill. They incorporate citational language and cinematic tropes born from it: the reliance on feelings as a guide to the truth, possession, addiction, and anxiety. With influences spanning genres, such as Robert Ashley’s opera Now Eleanor Idea, A Song of Ice and Fire audio-books, Tart comics, and the chatbot iPad app Talking Angela, each work contain storylines which never fully connect.
Anderson uses everyday materials, including pieces of dried food, eggshells, napkins, sticks, clay, paper, cotton, wood, concrete, and studio debris. Having fulfilled their use in one life, she re-animates them with a new purpose, even if that purpose is inherently flawed.
Flowers and Money is a grouping of 39 new works situated within a grid of vertical wooden poles. Sculptures include bits of orange peel and gum adjusted to resemble musical instruments, animal skeletons postured in pensile positions, and stacks of coins reinterpret Muppets’ faces as figurehead insignias. The poles are situated around the individual works, suggesting scaled-down city architecture such as columns, corporate buildings, and jail cells. These sculptures come together to create vignettes placed within a redacted landscape, insinuating an integrated story, only one that will not be revealed.
Viewed as a whole, the sculptures lurk incongruously in this landscape. To gauge each piece, the viewer places herself at a distance between close-up and from an arm’s length. The work asks for an impossible intimacy, refuting our expectations of autonomous objects laden with personal or esoteric significance.
*Flowers and Money is named after a pedigree racehorse that was prone to psychotic episodes, often times walking in a grid like formation.
Press release
CV