This body of work was 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.

"By the time it is night and the painting begins, the world fully drifts away and all I see are the highlighted flora from my headlamp and the dream of a potent experience with core elements overwhelms me and for a moment there’s no distractions. Hopefully the paintings carry this along to the viewer. Hopefully there’s a window created to the big picture if even for a moment." — Sam Falls

A selection of these works are currently on display in the Project Room at 303 Gallery. For more information on Sam Falls please visit his artist page here or contact Kathryn Erdman at kathryn@303gallery.com

Roses (Departure)
 

“I thought it would be significant to take the photograph of something from my old garden as I left, make the print, and then make the rain painting of the same plant in my new garden across the country. I knew that I had roses at both gardens, but more importantly a couple of my favorite paintings are Van Gogh’s Roses from 1890 and their historical context: when Van Gogh was finally feeling a sense of recovery and allowed release from the asylum Saint-Remy he made four last paintings there right before he left - four bouquets of flowers, two of which were pink roses - expressing hope and the luscious beauty of moving forward.” — Sam Falls

Preservation

“The flowers close at night and the temperature drops along with the precipitation, or just the dew. This is the same as looking up at the stars - in an instant the changes are imperceptible - but using time differently we can not only see it, but feel our relationship to both time and place. I made a long exposure of the stars at night from a forest deep in New Mexico, the light traveling so far shifts in color distinct to each distance and brightness, along with a tail or trail that allows us to perceive the rotation of the earth. Later on I printed the image at home and left it out with tiger Lillies cut from the garden in the evening, some already closed, some lazy and still open….”— Sam Falls

Night Sky, Summer Ground 

“This is another rain painting on canvas - the photo is a long exposure - about 3 hours at night in New Mexico - a night when you realize how bright the stars are after leaving a city as I had just begun driving cross-country. The painting was made at home over the course of several days of rain.”— Sam Falls

"A natural midpoint for a cross country trip is the Mississippi River. Despite it being April, it was cold the entire way we forded the river in a steady rain. We spent a solid five hours of the 3,000-mile drive listening to a series of interviews with the late David Berman recently posted on YouTube by Paula Crossfield... I lived in Chengdu one summer with Sam and we listened to and read Berman constantly and I always associated the two of them." — Josh Willey

Daniel Boone National Forest 

“This captures the dogwoods and eastern redbud and cherry trees in their nascent blooms. Driving cross-country to make some of these paintings was a reminder of just what you would expect, the country is both big and small. The colors were dynamic and the forests in spring varied from cold snow to humid heat, but in a way it made us feel was the same - there is a real fragility to nature amongst the growing highway-side strip malls, and while the highways are busy the forests are desolate.” — Sam Falls

​"We managed to follow the blossoms, tacking gradually northeast, across the entire continent. They were still blooming the day things came to an end, for my trip at least, in NYC. Sam, needing flowers for the work, was quite focused on finding them and repeatedly struck it rich. Of them all, the dogwood of Daniel Boone National Forest in Kentucky was most exquisite, although the magnolia of the Hudson Valley was hard to beat in the shear immediacy of its presence." — Josh Willey

Cherokee National Forest

“A photograph can’t preserve form and it lacks a dimensional scale - but by framing the image with the form perhaps there’s some new feeling closer to life - but again, really it’s also closer to death, to time passing... The works are bittersweet attempts at bottling life - every action has an equal.”— Sam Falls

Niagara’s Falls, Water’s Edge

“A large format (8x10) photograph of Niagara Falls (US side), I then used plants from the edge of the river and swamp area around our house upstate. We are below the falls here in upstate New York and I like to think of the same water running down here from the falls….”— Sam Falls

Bleeding Heart

“What are the integral elements that define human life on earth? Health (life), nature (environment, food), love (reproduction), death. And in my view, these are the core precepts of art through the ages that come to transcend the times and perpetually create an intermingling fifth element that engages our most fulfilling experience, beauty. Boy, it sounds dramatic - I guess I’ll leave out historic names like why a species of flower would be called “bleeding heart”. How does one embed themselves in this experience but also explore it and grow it outwards? I guess the best way is to get into it and expand – you look out the window, water the house plants, weed the garden, walk the trails, climb the mountains, swim the rivers, hit the road and camp across the country….”— Sam Falls

Sam Falls works intimately with the core precepts of photography –namely time, representation, and exposure – to create works that both bridge the gap between various artistic mediums and the divide between the artist, object, and viewer. Working symbiotically with nature and the elements, Falls's artworks are engrained with a sense of place indexical to the unique environment of their creation while imbued with a universal sense of mortality. With a reverence toward art history, Falls empathetically blurs the lines between artistic genres and practices, from modern dance and minimalist painting to conceptual photography and land art, boiling it down to the fundamentals of nature and the transience of life that art best addresses. 

For more information on Sam Falls please visit his artist page here or contact Kathryn Erdman at kathryn@303gallery.com