Samara Golden: if earth is the brain then where is the body

For nearly 15 years, Los Angeles-based artist Samara Golden has been creating installations that deploy architecture and mirrors to create disquieting and disorienting environments, often populated by individuals, or traces of their presence, that have in the past spoken to experiences of violence and its aftermath, disparities of class, or illness and recovery. Her often mind-bogglingly complex installations can range from seemingly chaotic to quietly seething. Golden populates them with handmade domestic forms and textures using such materials as plastics, epoxy, and spray foam to construct a setting both familiar and ill-at-ease in its artificiality. 

For her exhibition at the Nasher, Golden will create a new installation conceived for the Lower Level Gallery—a room fronted by windows, approached from a descending staircase. Visitors entering the gallery will encounter a seemingly infinite and fantastic space evoking cascading pools, ranging from the fetid to the paradisical—a place where memories, emotions, and possibilities converge. Within an environment constructed from converging mirrors, smaller-scale handmade elements populate realms that evoke sensations associated with water and waves, whether the oceanic reaches of the subconscious, the possibility of floating, suspended, as if in utero, or the enclosing depths that conjure the terror of drowning.  

Golden has created works for sites as varied as a room with a view of the Hudson River for the 2017 Whitney Biennial, a two-story, brick interior at MoMA PS1, an expansive gallery with a stained-glass window for Philadelphia’s Fabric Workshop and Museum, or a warehouse large enough to the accommodate the towering array that formed her 2022 installation Guts, now in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. In a time when mirrored surfaces often speak to opportunities for selfies and the closed loop of social media, Golden turns her mirrored environments into mise-en-abyme settings for uneasy enchantment and critical reflection. 

The Nasher Sculpture Center’s 2024 exhibitions are made possible by leading support from Frost Bank.

Additional support is provided by Dallas Art Fair Foundation.