Sam Contis: Moving Landscape
Over the three different series she has created – Deep Springs, Overpass and Cross Country – Sam Contis activates the intimacies between bodies and space, the experiences of time as durational and as geologic, and the relationality of movement, as a practice that connects people to each other and to the landscapes they move through.
From these intersections, she interrogates meanings we hold about gender, examines practices of place-making, and attends to the processes of becoming that shape how, and with whom, we identify.
Dr Anna Arabindan-Kesson
Associate Professor, Princeton University and AGWA Senior Research FellowAbout Sam Contis
Sam Contis (b. 1982) is a US-based visual artist working in photography and moving image. Recent shows include a 2022 early-career survey, Transit, at the Carré d’Art in Nîmes, and a collaboration, Duet, with the vocalist Inbal Hever at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York. Her work has been shown in group exhibitions at the Barbican Art Gallery, London; the Gropius-Bau, Berlin; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. She is the recipient of a 2024 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship (2022), the Nancy Graves Grant for Visual Artists (2016), and the Aaron Siskind Foundation Fellowship (2016). Contis’s work is represented in collections including the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Carré d’Art, Nîmes; Centre Pompidou, Paris; KADIST, Paris and San Francisco; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. Contis has published three monographs: Deep Springs (Mack, 2017), Day Sleeper (Mack, 2020), and Overpass (Aperture, 2022). She is a Senior Critic in Photography at the Yale School of Art.
