Sam Falls’s November exhibition includes work at LA><ART and two concurrent outdoor projects with Los Angeles Public Domain (L.A.P.D.), a public sculpture in Plummer Park and a billboard on La Cienega.
The wall works consist of metal bars that were later used to create prototypes for the final wind chimes suspended in the gallery. Along with these wall works, the LA><ART exhibition includes wind chimes placed in national forests and parks across California: in Big Sur, Joshua Tree National Park, Redwoods National Forest, the Klamath Mountains, Lassen National Forest, Los Padres National Forest, Cleveland National Forest, Yosemite National Park, Mammouth Lakes in Inyo National Forest, Sequoia National Forest and San Bernardino National Forest. For eight months prior to the exhibition the wind chimes reverberated in the wilderness—tintinnabulations in pine coves, boulder fields, mountain ridges and coastal escarpments across the state. In the weeks and days before the opening, the artist returned to the sites listed above to retrieve the pieces.
Having been weathered by the elements the chimes carry the holistic marks of exposure. The hanging metal, wood and wire each show the pendency that is a signature of Falls’s dual interest in representation and abstraction. Here distinct microclimatic changes in California are evident as the chimes represent something outside their own materiality.
Falls’s process with the wind chimes reaches a unique representation by collaborating with specific materials and their ability to absorb time and place. Though different than the weathered chimes, the two-dimensional works carry out an active relationship of production over time in the studio. By painting on the photograph with the same bars pictured, the wall works question representation by engaging inter-medium indexicality of the same subject on the same plane.