Connie Samaras: Framing the Conversation
Connie Samaras’s photographs are so lucid, their perspective so matter of fact, that it seems silly to ask, ‘what am I looking at?’ Yet questions arise: Is that golden triangle above the crusty Antarctic snow merely plywood? Can the man in the rowboat at the foot of a Dubai hotel hope to catch fish in that chlorine-blue water? For Samaras both responses are important: asking exactly what it is that we see, and noticing what makes us hesitate to voice our queries.
Enjoy Your Time, Samaras’s exhibition at Montalvo, focuses on three places that have been variously cited as cities-of-the-future—Dubai , Las Vegas, and the polar station at Antarctica. Growing out of a challenging landscape (desert or ice), they are literally works in progress, showcasing the latest technological thinking. It’s no accident, then, that some photographs have the airy drawing board look of an architect’s rendering, or the seductively saturated colors of a tourist brochure. No tourists can be found, though, in her Dubai restaurant with its dramatic view of an indoor ski slope, just a family-like grouping of condiments on each empty table.
Samaras has said she aims to document “liminal spaces.” These, from the Latin, limen, for threshold, are the doorstep areas where one set of expectations comes up against another. A honeycombed expanse stares out from one wall of Enjoy Your Time. It’s a Las Vegas hotel, but in the photograph it resembles a sheet of construction material. Similarly the hotel, the Paris, is itself a dormitory for gamblers sold as a technologically enhanced edition of old world luxury. Appreciating illusion is part of the pleasure of Vegas, just as it’s part of the pleasure of art.
Unlike a boundary fence, a threshold is meant to be crossed. Yet, in the word’s root image, the moment of crossing is always set apart from what lies on either side. Wavering in the doorway between is and seems, we are free to imagine a world operating under a different set of rules. Perhaps the Buckminster Fuller’s dymaxion dome, relic of 1970s idealism, that we see in Samaras’s Antarctic series, is not being subsumed by the polar ice but rising, phoenix-like, from it. In this sense her photographs resemble the portals encountered in science fiction—a subject she has written about and refers to frequently in her work.
For Samaras, all those physically altered realities aren’t the literature’s most interesting aspect. Rather, it’s the way science fiction uncouples natural processes from our assumptions about how they should be put to use. What if, say, commercial interests could be detached from aesthetic ones as easily as the color of water can be changed on a computer screen? Mirror-like, that question leads to another illusion. Samaras’s photographs may have eerie glow of a digitally manipulated images but what she’s using is the old-world physics of shadow and light.
To step across a threshold is to be conscious momentarily of existing within a frame. That’s what Samaras’s work provides:a kind of sensed equivalent to post and beam. Not quite inside, not quite out, the gray area they lead us to has an architecture but no name. It’s a lot like the place traditionally allocated to gays, women, and minorities. In it, the self coexists with an identity expressed in italics.
Elsewhere, Samaras, judo-like has turned such biases to her advantage, posing as a vacationing housewife to shoot the forbidden interiors of casinos, or adopting both the clothes—khaki pants, white shirt—and the entitled bluster of undercover police photographing heavily cordoned sites at L.A.’s Democratic Convention. This knowledge provides another kind of frame. As both an artist and an academic, Samaras is often ineligible to do what society pays her to do: document and observe. Adopting the chameleon demeanor of a spy, she has no trouble gaining access.
In its earliest incarnations a threshold marked the perimeter between shelter and exposure, with both states being necessary to survival. They still are. Halted in the no man’s land between them, we can look both ways. The question Samaras hopes we’ll ask: What exactly is in front of us?
