Sam Anderson creates compositions with figures and objects that inhabit oddly familiar relationships to the site and viewer. Often depicting intimate and internal dynamics, the arrangements are formal as well as psychological, effects expressed through repetition and mutations in scale and style. Using a range of found and made materials to construct her scenes, Anderson borrows from language as well as personal history to question how memory and emotion are indexed.
Sam Anderson: The Park includes a series of newly commissioned sculptures and a video work for SculptureCenter’s lower level galleries. For her exhibition, Anderson abstracts and isolates the town square. Casting particular characters in mid-gesture, Anderson suspends the actions of a community. A waitress, a stork, a children’s orchestra, a teacher, an entertainer, a pedestrian, a teen actress, a public sculpture, a designer, a historian and an escaped panther carry out their roles alongside and despite the others, each a fragment of a larger network.
Sam Anderson (born 1982 in Los Angeles; lives and works in New York) received her MFA from Yale University in 2010. Notable exhibitions include Endless Love, Tanya Leighton, Berlin (2015); Talley’s Folly, Mother’s Tankstation, Dublin (2015); The Mound Builders, Off Vendome, Düsseldorf (2014); and Flowers and Money, Chapter NY, New York (2013). Recently, Anderson was included in Robert Bordo, Sam Anderson with Michel Auder, Bortolami, New York (2016); and Greater New York, MoMA PS1, Long Island City (2015).
In 2013, Anderson presented a solo project as part of SculptureCenter’s Now Showing series. A new solo exhibition opens at Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne, Germany in summer 2017.
Sam Anderson: The Park is curated by SculptureCenter Curator Ruba Katrib.