303 Gallery is proud to present Preservation, a new body of work by Sam Falls, conceived during a 3-month road trip across the United States in the spring and summer of 2021, during Falls’ move from Los Angeles, California to New York’s Hudson Valley.
A contemplation of the sublimity and inherent melancholy of life, nature, love and death, the works offer an expansive chronology. Tracing the evolution of poppies, lupines, and desert blue bells blooming across the Southwest to the wild dogwoods, magnolias, and redbuds of the Northeast, Falls follows the blossoming of the American landscape and its transient temporality.
Falls captured the beauty of the season of rebirth, amidst the ever-expanding and dispirited American highway system, photographing and collecting the natural ephemera by day and painting under the stars by headlamp at night in National Forests. Free of the distractions of contemporary existence, Falls' contemplative meditations fossilize the shape of these and other familiar flora and fauna - roses, tiger lilies, doves, dogwoods, nascent cherry blossoms and bleeding hearts are haloed by vibrant color.
Finishing the works upon reaching home in upstate New York, twinkling stars, rain water, and the lingering brush of petals lend themselves to the series - amidst the artist's nods to Ovid's Metamorphoses, Van Gogh, and Modernist philosophy. Some of the paintings are rendered over a unique printed photograph, a development in Falls' ouevre.