Ballroom Marfa Art Fund
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Visual Art

Sam Falls

13 Mar 201516 Aug 2015

Venue

Marfa, Texas
Free

Exhibition

Ballroom Marfa presented Sam Falls, an exhibition of new work highlighting Falls’ multidisciplinary approach to time and representation. The show featured all new sound, video, sculptural, and wall work, and was accompanied by an exhibition catalogue documenting the process and final installation of the artworks.

The transformation of materials and forms through the elements and time wove its way through many of Falls’ pieces. The exhibition showcased works created during Falls’ residency in Marfa in July 2014, where the artist engaged directly with the shapes and hues unique to the Far West Texas landscape.

“A significant element of my work is representing time and place through a merging of sculpture, painting, and photography; this idea was catalyzed in part by my trips to Marfa over the past several years,” says the artist. “I was taken by Donald Judd’s outdoor work Untitled (15 Works in Concrete) at the Chinati Foundation, impressed by how fixed and changeless the works appear compared to the landscape and passing time. As a result I have created several works based off of my love for minimal form but replaced its defiance of nature with an integration of the environment and change.”

Falls’ work approached the legacy of Minimalism in Marfa by engaging in a dialogue around sculpture, preservation, landscape, and authorship, that could only happen in the context of Marfa’s singular art historical landscape.

Artist Profile

Sam Falls

Sam Falls (b. 1984, San Diego, CA) lives and works in Los Angeles. His work has recently been shown at LAXART (Los Angeles), the Zabludowicz Collection (London), the Pomona College Museum of Art (California), Museo MADRE (Naples), International Center of Photography (New York), and the American Academy in Rome, . His work is in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, LACMA, Los Angeles, Centre Pompidou, Paris, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, and the International Center for Photography, New York, among others. He received his BA from Reed College and his MFA from ICP-Bard. He has published more than ten books, including Death Sequence(Karma, 2014), Life Size (Karma, 2012), Studio Space Print Time (Printed Matter, 2013), Light Work (Gottlund Verlag, 2010) and Visible Library (Lay Flat, 2011).

Limited Edition

Now LP

Sam Falls. Now LP, 2015. Blue marbled vinyl. 12 x 12 inches. Edition of 175. Signed and Numbered

Sarah Smith – Vocal  •  Quentin Moore – Guitars  •  Adam Steck – Bass  •  Mike Kutchman – Piano  •  Trip Warner – Feedback guitar

Recorded and mixed by Mike Kutchman at KUTCH-1 Studios in Brooklyn, NY.


Created in collaboration with a group of musicians, this limited edition, blue-marbled vinyl stems from a sound piece by Sam Falls, which played on a loop in Ballroom Marfa’s gallery as part of his 2015 solo exhibition. The limited-edition record features a woman’s voice repeating the word “now” alongside simple chords played by four musicians. The LP that plays in the exhibition contains a thin metal strip that causes the record to skip, creating an original composition with each rotation. This sound work speaks to another work in the show, Falls’ video piece Untitled (Now), where he continuously writes the word “now” into sand with a stick before it gets repeatedly washed away by waves at the ocean shore. Together the works reflect the artist’s interest in capturing the passage of time and its elements, providing viewers with various mediums in which to consider the present.

“I wanted to visualize how we can see or hear time as it passes to be reminded of its unified past, present, and future; every moment is ‘now,’ or will be ‘now,’ or was ‘now.’ ‘Now’ is a temporal shifter as I see it, and so these works regenerate the word to inform the moment both as specific and as the works progress elliptically ‘now’ becomes abstracted and wholly representational.” — Excerpt from Sam Falls artist statement

Exhibition Catalogue

Published by Ballroom Marfa.

Texts by Fairfax Dorn, Ballroom Marfa Found and Artistic Director; David Raskin, Professor of Art History, Theory and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Sam Falls, artist and poet.


Sam Falls inhabits a space between artist book and traditional exhibition catalogue. Focused on his solo exhibition at Ballroom Marfa and the new body of work produced for the project, the book features a scholarly essay by art historian David Raskin, an introduction by Ballroom Marfa co-founder Fairfax Dorn, along with new poetry by Falls. Designed by Lorraine Wild at Green Dragon Office and with exhibition photography by Fredrik Nilsen, this lush catalogue mixes documentation of Falls’ exhibition in Marfa with original verse and photos of the works in progress by the artist himself.

Installation Images