Sam Falls

We Are Dust and Shadow

Jan 27-Jun 11, 2023

Sam Falls, Untitled (San Bernardino National Forest, CA.), 2017-2019. Pigment on canvas, 128 x 272 in. (325.1 x 690.9 cm). Courtesy Sam Falls and 303 Gallery, New York

Sam Falls’s show at moCa, the artist’s first major solo museum exhibition, offers expansive insight into his unique practice of collaborating with nature to create monumental paintings and sculptures. Falls’s poetic, ghostly works examine the sublimity and inherent melancholy of nature’s cycles and finite life. Interested in photographic exposure and representation, Falls experiments with the effects of sunlight, rain, and temperature, harnessing weather patterns and environmental conditions to create paintings, sculptures, and photographs in and with nature. In addition to new sculptures and paintings made by Falls in various national parks across the country, moCa has partnered with the Cleveland Botanical Garden & Holden Arboretum to support Falls’s creation of a new ceramic work, using materials from Northeast Ohio.

Lead support for Sam Falls: We Are Dust and Shadow is provided by Dealer Tire.

Generous support provided by 303 Gallery and Galerie Eva Presenhuber.

Additional support provided by the Anselm Talalay Photography Fund.

About the Artist


Sam Falls. Photo: Erin Falls
Sam Falls Sam Falls (b. 1984, San Diego, CA) works intimately with the core precepts of photography–namely time, representation, and exposure–to create works that both bridge the gap between various artistic mediums and the divide between the artist, object, and viewer. Working symbiotically with nature and the elements, Falls’s artworks are engrained with a sense of place indexical to the unique environment of their creation while imbued with a universal sense of mortality. With a reverence toward art history, Falls empathetically blurs the lines between artistic genres and practices, from modern dance and minimalist painting to conceptual photography and land art, boiling it down to the fundamentals of nature and the transience of life that art best addresses. Falls is represented by 303 Gallery (New York), Galerie Eva Presenhuber (Zurich and Vienna), Jessica Silverman Gallery (San Francisco), and Galleria Franco Noero (Turin).

Sam Falls. Photo: Erin Falls

Sam Falls

Sam Falls (b. 1984, San Diego, CA) works intimately with the core precepts of photography–namely time, representation, and exposure–to create works that both bridge the gap between various artistic mediums and the divide between the artist, object, and viewer. Working symbiotically with nature and the elements, Falls’s artworks are engrained with a sense of place indexical to the unique environment of their creation while imbued with a universal sense of mortality. With a reverence toward art history, Falls empathetically blurs the lines between artistic genres and practices, from modern dance and minimalist painting to conceptual photography and land art, boiling it down to the fundamentals of nature and the transience of life that art best addresses. Falls is represented by 303 Gallery (New York), Galerie Eva Presenhuber (Zurich and Vienna), Jessica Silverman Gallery (San Francisco), and Galleria Franco Noero (Turin).