Don’t Look Up

When Samara Golden dreams she sees clear, transparent people. Sometimes the light feels a particular way. Or maybe she is standing in a vast, open ocean looking down. “I never feel like I can make what I want on Earth because the limitations of everything are too much,” says Golden, whose immersive and perceptive bending installations consist of mirrors and an assemblage of hand-made and altered found objects. “I guess what I'm really trying to get at is an emotional feeling to build up through these things.”

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“Don’t look up,” the Los Angeles-based artist requests when viewing her installation at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, “if earth is the brain then where is the body,” which runs through January 12, 2024. Instead, stand on the platform and peer down at a shipwreck of objects at sea: dolphins, alligators, tiny frogs, pants, miniature fold-out chairs, half a couch completed by its reflection in the mirror, dried leaves, and foam bodies covered in moss, lying as if they fell, curled up or sprawled out. Not to mention the abstract, almost painterly shapes: colorful squiggly foam, Tahitian blue water rendered in tulle, shimmery teal-gold reflective seaweed.

Across the way, the mirrored walls reflect in dizzying multiples. Above the optical illusion, a layered forest of materials dangles from the ceiling, reflecting on the mirrored surface below. Even the mechanisms are implicated in the work: Approximately 400 sheets of plastic were melted by heat and suspended by strings. Fans whirr and blow lights that dangle from cords, casting a watery reflection on the walls. 

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“Controlling the context is what was able to make it possible for me to look at a piece for longer,” Golden says, “not having all the other pieces in my sight range.” But what if she could also remove her own set-up from view? A departure from her past work, in which her structures were visible and implicated in the work. For her site-specific installation at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, an infinity-mirror room was filled with objects. A few years later, at Night Gallery in LA in 2022, she created a towering structure that recalled a skyscraper filled with materials that evoked snakes, guts, and post-nuclear people among other things. At the Renzo Piano-designed Nasher, built specifically to display sculpture, she explores how to escape the very structure that holds together her vision. “They basically gave me a white box to work with,” she says of the empty room in which she built her environment.

Here, the artist pushed the structure into relative obscurity, making it so big you have to enter it and thus forget its posterior. Like a magic trick, the device is hidden from plain view, like someone in a thriller clinging to a ceiling to avoid getting caught. “I've been trying to work towards a graceful gesture, finding where I want to go through more abstract means, so that nothing means exactly anything,” she says. “I feel more connected to that now because it's such a confusing time.”

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“The horrible tragedy of my work is that I make all this stuff with tons of details that no one ever gets to see,” Golden says. “They don't know it's there.” But the artist is compelled to make every component by hand, anyway. “I'm superstitious,” she offers. “I couldn't just make a couple smooth moves and then hope for it to hit the same pitch.” On the right side of the gallery, she reveals, there is an entire room full of pieces she didn’t use.

The artist is thoughtful and hesitant to make definitive claims about her work. “I think my work is always about confusion,” she says with a laugh. “Sometimes I can't figure out what it really means to me until a lot later.” Naturally, she was thinking of two sides of the coin for “if earth is the brain then where is the body.” From one perspective, the installation, she says, “is a river where everything swills together, a disgusting place. It's totally scary, and you wouldn't want to touch it.” But it is also a vacation destination: “Collectively, I think that we all want to go to a beautiful, open ocean to get some relief from our lives.” 

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The idea to create such an illusion around water and what it can hold has been germinating for Golden quite some time. “I was hoping to be able to make something as endless as the experience of being in front of the ocean,” she shares. She tried out different techniques, one too much like a swimming pool, one too space station-adjacent before she landed on her Nasher installation: a pie-shaped room with two mirror walls and a floor with mirrors. “It ended up being dangerously close to an aquarium,” she concedes. “I really didn’t want to make that, but it ended up being useful. The result is a piece about being stuck or trapped. “And also all the people around it make a giant circle of gawkers,” she notes.

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In the last few days of creation before all the parts of the work shipped, the artist pried herself away from her Boyle Heights studio and set out to the ocean where she took photographs of the foam on the water. You know how when you go to a body of water, it can be really mesmerizing?” she asks. “I love the idea of having artwork that someone could go to where they could get a chance to think or feel.”

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‍“Samara Golden: if earth is the brain then where is the body” is on view until January 12, 2025 at the Nasher Sculpture Center at 2001 Flora St, Dallas, TX 75201.