Samuel Ace - Artist Statement

The Landscapes

Since moving west to Arizona from New York in 1997, I have been making large-format color photographs. The work reflects human interventions and architectures within the landscape. Over the years, the photographs have been shot in various locations in the Southwest - downtown Tucson, Sonoita, Canyon de Chelly, Flagstaff, and New Mexico. I have also photographed in the East - on Cape Cod, the Atlantic coast, and Southern France.

Landscapes, even the most remote, contain remnants of human activity. Instead of seeing those remnants as the pollution of an otherwise ‘pure’ and untouched landscape, I have often been struck by the singularity of a water tower, a string of power poles, the shape of a ruined structure, and the ability of such architectures to focus the vast spaces surrounding them.

Recently I have been photographing encampments on the edge of a man-made dammed lake in Elephant Butte, NM, for a series entitled Fee Simple, a meditation on the ownership of real property and its place in the landscape.

Transitional Objects

We have a powerful and anxious curatorial relationship with the objects we adhere to. We discard, replace, and alter them, out of a deeper knowledge that it is we who pass through their existence, not they who pass through ours. Someone else will handle them when we are beyond being touched ourselves.

This anxiety pervades all of our relationships to things.

Why, then do we derive such comfort from objects? Is it them or us who long to be truly familiar? Rainer Maria Rilke wrote about the thinness of the distinction between the realm of the living and the dead in the Duino Elegies:

. . .Strange to see meanings that clung
together once floating away in every direction.
And being dead is hard work and full of retrieval
before one can gradually feel a trace of eternity.
Though the living are wrong to believe in the
too-sharp distinctions which
they themselves have created . . .

Ranier Maria Rilke;
from the first elegy of The Duino Elegies
transl. Stephen Mitchell

Many of the photographs in the project were taken at swap meets, thrift shops, restaurants, antique malls, and yard sales in the Southwestern United States. Transitional Objects is an on-going examination of our relationship to objects as they travel through our lives.

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Education

1987 City College of New York, MA, Creative Writing

1977 Independent Study Program – Whitney Museum of Art

1976 Yale University, BA, Fine Arts

Exhibitions

Solo:

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