Sam CONTIS
Garden (Double back), 2015/2024
Gelatin silver print
15.87 x 12.7 cm
(6.25 x 5 in)
Edition of 5
“CONTIS’s images capture the strange beauty of the high desert in macro- and microscopic views. The resonance of earth and body and the sensual echoes of human and animal give her works an Ovidian sense of imminent metamorphoses.”
-Lawrence Rinder
In her series Deep Springs, made in a remote high desert valley, CONTIS engages with the pervasive mythology of the American West. In pictures made at one of the last all-male colleges in the United States, her protagonists perform the iconic role of the cowboy, branding cattle and riding on horseback through the eastern Sierra. At the same time her intimate, tactile studies suggest a more fluid conception of masculinity. In this new image from her archive, two bodies work in the garden, each mirroring the other, conjoining as they reach into the earth.
Sam CONTIS
Garden (Double back), 2015/2024
Gelatin silver print
15.87 x 12.7 cm
(6.25 x 5 in)
Edition 1/5 + I AP
Sam CONTIS (b. 1982) works primarily in photography and moving image. Recent shows include a 2022 early-career survey, Transit, at the Carré d’Art in Nîmes, France, 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, London; the Gropius-Bau, Berlin; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She is the recipient of a 2024 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship (2022), the Nancy Graves Grant for Visual Artists (2016), and the Aaron Siskind Foundation Fellowship (2016). CONTIS’s work is represented in collections including the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Carré d’Art, Nîmes; Centre Pompidou, Paris; KADIST, Paris and San Francisco; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. Contis has published three monographs: Deep Springs (Mack, 2017), Day Sleeper (Mack, 2020), and Overpass (Aperture, 2022).
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