Connie Samaras
Los Angeles, CA
Connie Samaras lives and works in Los Angeles. She was born in Albuquerque, NM. Working primarily in photography and video, she employs a variety of interdisciplinary frames and aesthetic strategies in developing projects. Her ongoing interests include: the variable membrane between fiction and real world; political geographies and psychological dislocation in the everyday; speculative landscapes and architectural narratives; science fiction genres and future imaginaries; the legacy of U.S. social change movements in a shifting global economy; paradox and the political unconscious; art as historical artifact and differing systems of cataloguing history. Over the past 25 years she has shown her work extensively, including a solo exhibition After the American Century at the California Museum of Photography, Riverside. Past awards include a California Community Foundation Fellowship, the Anonymous Was a Woman Award, the Adeline Kent Award, and a National Science Foundation Office of Polar Programs Artists and Writers Grant.
Edge of Twilight/Tales of Tomorrow
Connie Samaras is a video and photography artist who employs a variety of interdisciplinary frames and aesthetic strategies in developing projects.
Artist BioBoth a video installation and series of photographs, Edge of Twilight will be shot at a lesbian RV retirement community located in the U.S. southwestern desert. Structurally borrowing from the genres of sci-fi time-travel and tourism literature, the video will be scripted to include elements of oral history, contemporary apocalyptic youth literature, lesbian feminist and radical economy manifestos from the 1970s, and the utopic propositions of western expansion as well as other cultural and historical sources. Edge of Twilight was exhibited in Connie Samaras: Tales of Tomorrow at the Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, CA in February 2013. This show surveys Samaras’ projects from the past fifteen years and is curated by the Center’s Director of Exhibitions, Irene Tsatsos.