Samara Golden’s “The Flat Side of the Knife” (2014)

In one of the Yale School of Art’s first virtual Visiting Artist lectures, Los Angeles-based artist Samara Golden shares the ideas and intentions underlying her immersive installation “The Flat Side of the Knife,” which first filled MoMA PS1’s Duplex Gallery in 2014. With impossible staircases, reversed reflections, and three beds that appear hierarchically stacked, Golden creates a visual metaphor for the liminal space between reality and dreams, life and death, and known and unknown through the familiar language of residential interiors. What results is the manifestation of an internal labyrinth, revealing what Golden describes as “layers of consciousness” in the building of a kind of psychological architecture.

Samara Golden was born in Michigan in 1973 and received her MFA from Columbia University in 2009. Her most recent project “The Meat Grinder’s Iron Clothes” was featured in the 2017 Whitney Biennial. Golden has had recent solo exhibitions at MoMA PS1, New York; YBCA, San Francisco; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; and CANADA, New York. Her work was included in the 2014 Hammer Biennial, and Room to Live at MOCA Los Angeles. In 2015 a monograph on Golden was published by MoMA PS1, and her work has been written about in ArtForum, Art in America, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Mousse, among other publications. Golden’s work is in the permanent collection of The Whitney Museum, New York; LACMA, and MOCA Los Angeles; The Zabludowicz Collection, London; and Yuz Museum, Shanghai. Learn more about the artist on her website: https://samaragolden.com/home.html

Samara Golden was a Visiting Artist in Sculpture at the Yale School of Art during the Spring 2020 semester, and the virtual lecture that this clip is pulled from was delivered on April 8, 2020. Find all Spring 2020 VA lectures archived on the School of Art website: https://www.art.yale.edu/news/virtual-visiting-artist-lectures

“Samara Golden: The Flat Side of the Knife” was on view at MoMA PS1 in Queens, NY from October 26, 2014 – August 30, 2015. Video editing by Morgan Levy, Photography MFA ‘20.

Видео Samara Golden’s “The Flat Side of the Knife” (2014) канала Yale School of Art