DANIEL O'GORMAN Represents

Sam Falls: Lawless Bond  

Lawless Bond, a solo exhibition of new photography and video by Samuel Falls. Opening June 4^th, Capricious Space, the works are on view through July 10, 2010. A reception will take place on Friday, June 4^th, from 7 – 9pm.

In Falls’ words, “photography has become synonymous with language, maybe even replaced it in the hierarchy of contemporary communication. As an art form, we are hypothetically freed up from using the image as a guide, but that is not always an easy expectation for the viewer to accept. The viewer of photography, like language, traditionally expects a universal symbolism; a qualified meaning that has been chewed up and spit back out over time.” Through this body of work, Falls poses the questions: How can we unite art and photography without these expectations — without these semiotic laws? How can the photograph and the viewer exist right now, together?

French philosopher and semiotician, Roland Barthes suggests the “dissociation of solidarities, of empathies – powerful here, null there. Critique of the totalizing illusion: any apparatus unifies the language first, but one must not respect the whole… The Sentence is hierarchical: it implies subjections, subordinations, internal reactions. Whence its completion: how can a hierarchy remain open?” (Pleasure of the Text, pg. 38/50)

Falls’ work explores the notion that Modernism was about the medium; the medium was a structure to make “sentences” within, to create an overall narrative. He posits that Postmodernism then abandons the medium to represent the accomplishment of the master narrative’s endgame, a closed book. Falls sees however that the medium of photography has many fluid possibilities and that perhaps a return to specificity does not have to imply an inevitable end; rather it can run like a river –- a liquid body, a lawless bond.