“Project Series 49: Sam Falls” will be on display Sept. 2 through Dec. 19 at the Pomona College Museum of Art, 330 N. College Ave., Claremont.
The exhibition represents the first solo museum exhibition of the Los Angeles and New York-based artist. For this exhibition, the artist presents new work, including several of his signature weather-driven paintings and a new sitespecific outdoor sculpture composed of an altered pickup truck filled with succulents.
“Project Series 49:
Sam Falls” will have a public reception from 5 to 7 p.m., Saturday, Sept. 6, and an artist talk at 1:30 p.m., Tuesday, Sept. 9. Both events will take place at the museum and are open to the public. There is no cost to attend.
In his work, Falls investigates the mutability of perception, examining entropy, the artistic process and the natural processes of decomposition and deterioration, particularly the longterm effects of sunlight and weather. His newest rain-works, on display in the exhibition, expand his exploration of the shifting terrain between nature, place and duration. By using sun and rain instead of a paintbrush or camera, the works echo Falls’ interests in process art and the dialogue between abstraction and representation.
Falls created the paintings in the exhibition by placing large sheets of raw canvas outside prior to a storm, then arranging organic material — palm fronds
in California and ferns in Vermont — on the canvas, and, finally,
spreading dry pigment over the plants and canvases. Where the plants
masked the canvas from the vibrantly colored pigment, a silhouette image
was created.
The
duration of the storm, the quality and amount of the rain, the randomly
applied pigmentation, and the vegetal forms dictated the resulting
images. Falls’ work emphasizes this open-ended process. The finished
works are luminous and painterly, with layers of saturated colors.
Falls’
most recent sculpture, “Untitled (Life in California),” is located in
the museum’s courtyard. The altered Ford Ranger dates to 1984, the year
of Falls’ birth in San Diego. To create the work, Falls sandblasted the
truck in random patterns to reveal layers of red and tan paint and the
steel base beneath. He clear-coated some parts to protect from rust
while others were left raw. Over time, the sculpture will shift and
transform—the succulents will grow, and the truck’s surface will change
color and texture as it weathers.
While
influenced by 1970s art historical movements, including Minimalism,
Earth art, Process art, and Los Angelescentric Finish Fetish and Light
and Space, Falls also embraces the very contemporary intersection of the
digital, historical and natural. His study of various photographic
processes has guided his thinking about light, time, place and elements.
Starting
with his graduate work at the International Center of Photography-Bard
program in New York, Falls has developed a rigorous yet open-ended
conceptual and intellectual framework that guides his projects. He first
experimented with the effects of sunlight fading craft paper in
graduate school, creating natural “color photograms” in his New York
studio. On trips to California, he experimented with scaled-up
photograms on large sheets of fabric covered with simple objects like
tires and wooden twoby-fours. The resultant photograms left a ghostly
outline of the object in the weathered and faded image.
In
Falls’ “photogram” works, a shadow image is left on the fabric, while
the uncovered areas fade or deteriorate in the sunlight. In this way, he
says, the works are “tied to a specific place and time. The place is
the outdoors — a symbolic space imbued with layers of meanings. The time
is extended into months and years, rather than seconds. In the time
that passes during the work’s creation, many things happen to the piece
itself, but perhaps more intriguingly, things happen in the world that
impact our perception of the artwork.”
The
Sam Falls exhibition is the 49th in the Pomona College Museum of Art’s
Project Series, which presents Southern California artists in focused
exhibitions and is curated by Rebecca McGrew. A catalogue, designed by
Nicholas Gottlund, accompanies the exhibition and includes essays by
McGrew and writer David Pagel. The Project Series is supported in part
by the Pasadena Art Alliance.