Sam Anderson 'A Flower Is A Lovesome Thing' Opens Today

Chapter NY is pleased to announce A Flower Is A Lovesome Thing, Sam Anderson's second solo exhibition at the gallery.

Anderson's practice draws from a wide range of subject matter and media including film, sound, assemblage, and sculpture. Stemming from an early background in theater, Anderson has developed a particular sensitivity to the subtleties of language and gestures employed by archetypal, cultural figures. Her work seeks to transcend its physicality by referencing greater linguistic systems, social grids, or emotional strata.

A Flower Is A Lovesome Thing includes Anderson's latest video installation, centrally placed amid a selection of recent sculpture. The shared title of both the exhibition and video references Vince Guaraldi's instrumental adaptation of a song by the same name. Set within a 'box office window', a nebulous entity slowly rises and hovers in darkness before dissolving into stock and educational imagery. Two synchronized voices overlap to deliver an original monologue sourced in part from the 1992 film Enchanted April and the 1935 film Bride of Frankenstein. The entity possesses a highly developed vocabulary, yet, like Frankenstein's creature, struggles when exposed to unfamiliar or threatening cultural phenomena. The creature, a caricature of extreme suffering, has limited linguistic tools to perceive and communicate its own nuanced emotional experiences; its raw gestural reactions become its own language. Anderson's sculptural work explores comparable themes of this emergent expression of the inability to process reality.

A grouping of precisely arranged sculptures embody sad, sometimes funny, and familiar states of being. Trapped within their signified roles and fixed by their corporeality, Anderson's figures characterize situational anxieties in several forms. She explores the discord present in both complex and basic human emotions, and the application of these gestures onto sculptural objects. The works include: a pair of children or Best Friends approaching a box office window beyond reach, a catalogue-inspired bride that stands alone, a second bride occupying the figurehead of a 'boat', two babies battling for personal space, a prototypical Sunrise comprised of stacked rolls of tape and a bottle of sunscreen, and a functional harp, constructed by the artist, that suggests the sound of a dream sequence - at once elegant and approaching irrelevancy.

Brimming with poetic implications, Anderson's autonomous works collectively allow for a broader reading as a single composition, inviting viewers interpretations to mutate and evolve. By carefully manipulating scale with everyday materials, she reformats viewpoints that are both indeterminate and grounded in reality, and creates improbable pairings within multiple genres.

Sam Anderson was born in Los Angeles, CA and currently lives and works in New York, NY. In 2010 she received an MFA in sculpture from Yale University. She has had solo exhibitions at Joan, Los Angeles (2018), Sculpture Center, New York (2017, 2013), Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2017), Rowhouse Project, Baltimore (2016), Tanya Leighton, Berlin (2015), Mother's Tankstation, Dublin (2014), and Chapter NY (2013). Her work has also been included in exhibitions at MoMA PS1, Queens (2015), Maccarone, New York (2015), White Columns, New York (2015), Night Gallery, Los Angeles (2014, 2012), and the ICA Philadelphia (2012). Anderson's films have been included in exhibitions at Anthology Film Archives, New York (2013, 2009). Mousse Publishing published a monograph of Anderson's work in 2017.

Chapter NY 249 East Houston Street New York, NY 10002 www.chapter-ny.com Gallery hours: Wed - Sun, 11- 6pm.