For nearly 15 years, Los Angeles-based artist Samara Golden has been making installations that create disquieting and disorienting environments. Often populated by individuals, or traces of their presence, these spaces have in the past spoken to experiences of violence and its aftermath, disparities of class, or illness and recovery. Her often mind-bogglingly complex installations, which use mirrors in architectural spaces to create a sense of vast space, can range from seemingly chaotic to quietly seething. While Golden may populate them with figures, she has often focused on other forms, whether office equpiment, hospital beds, or the remains of a meal, suggesting a place recently deserted. Each element is handmade by the artist, who uses such materials as plastics, epoxy, and spray foam to construct a setting both familiar and ill-at-ease in its artificiality.
Within the Lower Level Gallery, Golden has created a new installation that presents something of a departure from her previous body of work, which has generally depended upon the structure of an architectural setting as a mental metaphor, which different spatial levels multiplied to a dizzying degree. For the Nasher, visitors instead enter a darkened gallery at the foot of the building's staircase to encounter a seemingly infinite and fantastic space that appears to open up the ground beneathe the museum. The resulting vision evokes a rippling body of water, ranging from the fetid to the paradisical—a place where memories, emotions, and thoughts converge in possibilities encompassing the oceanic reaches of the subconscious, the sensation of floating, suspended, as if in utero, and the enclosing depths that conjure the terror of drowning.
Golden has created works for sites as varied as a large gallery with a view of the Hudson River for the 2017 Whitney Biennial; a two-story, brick interior at MoMA PS1, New York; an expansive gallery with a stained-glass window for Philadelphia’s Fabric Workshop and Museum, and a warehouse large enough to the accommodate the towering array that formed her 2022 installation Guts, now in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. In a time when mirrored surfaces often speak to opportunities for selfies and the closed loop of social media, Golden transforms her mirrored environments into mise-en-abyme settings for seemingly infinitely repeated motifs to yield uneasy enchantment and critical reflection.
The Nasher Sculpture Center's 2024 exhibitions are made possible by leading support from Frost Bank.
Additional support for Samara Golden: if earth is the brain then where is the body is provided by the Dallas Art Fair Foundation, Miyoung Lee, Karen Hillenburg, and Carole Server.