October 29, 2006 - January 8, 2007
Playing the role of both actor and director, Sam Samore stages his own death in various ways—strangled with a telephone cord, asphyxiated, overdosed—and examines a macabre psychology in works that are both cinematic and documentary. These black and white pictures evoke both contemporary film noir and a crime scene investigation, and also offer an eerie take on the self-portrait. A sense of absurdist humor and the tragicomic is evident in a number of works in the exhibition. In one picture from the 1973 series, a poster in the background offers an image of a hand holding a flower, and the encouraging words: “Hang onto life for all it’s worth.” The viewers, questioning what appears before them, are themselves investigators at the scene of a drama.-
