Professor Anna Arabindan-Kesson has curated the first exhibition of the work of Sam Contis in Australia at the Art Gallery of Western Australia.  She writes about the project below.

"Sam’s practice addresses the history of photography, and film, to critically examine how images have perpetuated ideas of landscape, body and gender. And so, the opportunity to bring Sam’s work to Australia, where this photographic history has had wide-ranging impacts, was a dream. The show, Sam Contis: Moving Landscape, at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, in Boorloo/Perth, Western Australia where I have an affiliation as their inaugural Senior Research Fellow, is the first exhibition of Sam’s work in Australia."

—Anna Arabindan-Kesson

This has been an exciting exhibition project for me to work on over the last two years. Sam Contis is a photographer whose work revolves around the construction of place and self.

In her practice she moves between black and white and color, and large- and intimately-scaled views. She builds what she calls "a new terrain" from multiple perspectives and fragments to explore different ways of seeing and experiencing the body and its environment. 

I've known Sam for a long time - since we were both at graduate school - and there is an interesting convergence in our intellectual interests. In different ways we are both thinking about historical processes of representation, ways of seeing, and the circuits between imagery, perception and identification.

Sam's practice addresses the history of photography, and film, to critically examine how images have perpetuated ideas of landscape, body and gender. And so, the opportunity to bring Sam's work to Australia, where this photographic history has had wide-ranging impacts, was a dream. The show, Sam Contis: Moving Landscape, at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, in Boorloo/Perth, Western Australia where I have an affiliation as their inaugural Senior Research Fellow, is the first exhibition of Sam's work in Australia.

It's also unique because it gives viewers the opportunity to engage closely with the three main bodies of work that Sam has produced over her career so far. The show incorporates the three different series she has created – Deep Springs, Overpass, and Cross Country –and it activates the intimacies between bodies and space, the experiences of time as durational and as geologic, and the relationality of movement as a practice that connects people to each other and to the landscapes they move through.

Sam's work pushes photography into new zones: they have a remarkable tactility, her experimentation with shadow, tone, light, create a liquidity and texture that animates each scene in remarkable ways. There is a three-dimensionality to the photographs that is mesmerizing. But her work is also unique for the ways it moves us into and through the landscape. 

We imagined that moving through the exhibition would also be a little like moving through different landscapes, as the three series flow into each other in interesting ways. Sam choreographed the pacing of the works into a beautiful rhythm, so you really feel a sense of movement, something cinematic, as you move through the show. 

The three series are all embedded in different landscapes (more about the series below) and mediate different interactions between human and non-human life in the landscape. The works explore experiences of movement, restriction, physical duration, labor, geological change, sensuality and bodily autonomy: all themes that have deep significance in the current global, political and environmental conditions we are living through.

Each of the series dealt with different kinds of landscapes - Deep Springs is set in the desert, Cross Country is set in the agricultural farmlands of central Pennsylvania and Overpass is set in the rural fields and walkways of England - that have deep resonance with the landscapes - and their histories - that we know in Australia as well.

Australia has a complicated relationship to landscape and its representation, given its colonial histories. The Art Gallery of Western Australia is built on the unceded lands of the Whadjuk Noongar people. It holds a large collection of British landscape painting. Western Australia has unique landscapes: we have a stunning coastline; a large agricultural industry; an enormous mining industry in the center and north, and much of the state is desert. So while these works have a particular local significance - in the US or the UK - I thought there would be a familiarity to them for viewers in Western Australia, because of the experiences and meanings of landscape that are well circulated there.

This to me is one of the most powerful aspects of Sam's work while it's very specific, locally grounded, and collaborative - Sam works very closely with the communities she photographs - in its composition, its formal concerns and its themes, it speaks to concerns that cross the borders of both time and space. Her work allows us to re-envision what we think we know about ourselves and our environment, leading us towards alternative possibilities of experience.

For all these reasons, working on this show with Sam was tremendous and important. Collaboration, thinking with, and supporting artists is the reason I am an art historian, and remains the focus of my own intellectual work. So, this collaboration was also deeply personal, because it gave me the opportunity to share aspects of the work I do in the U.S. with my communities in Boorloo/Perth, Western Australia, which is where I am from, and where I call home.