Sam Falls’ work continues to explore the boundary between photography and the plastic arts while questioning nature photography’s fundamental relationship to the real world. Using light sensitive photo- graphic materials as a foundation, Falls builds a model of photographic representation that is at once accurate yet abstract. His pictures truthfully represent what is imaged, but expand outward as they embrace the conceptual ideas of mark and pattern making. Color, being essential to the reading of these images in both its representational and applied form, further reinforces the essential tension of these works. Phillip S. Block These pieces hold opposing colors in two different mediums. Conceptually the idea is to begin with the pure elements of photography, light and time, as well as its traditionally fundamental goal, representation, and have those properties dictate the work’s expansion out from the singular medium of photography and collapsed with painting whose fundamental properties have been changed by photography from originally functioning as representation and over time released from this duty by photography into the realm of abstraction. So this work straddles these functions and the contemporary context which lies between abstraction and representation, modern and traditional.

Sam Falls