Sam falls artist

At Sadie Coles he showed work featuring the imprint of huge palm leaves on weathered canvases splattered with rain saturated with pigment, while at the Zabludowicz Collection there were boldly painted aluminium sculptures and a recent series of five video works using appropriated scenes from Tarkovsky films played against a segment of a Velvet Underground song.

But as varied as his practice is, a clear conceptual thread connects these very disparate-seeming works. Falls is preoccupied by ideas of time, mutability and duration. He does this with works that appear in large part to employ chance, but, surprisingly, the outcomes rarely surprise Falls. As with much of his work, the palm leaf series is largely created by the elements.

Falls coated the leaves with different-coloured powdered pigments and laid them on a canvas, which he left outside in his backyard in la.

Sam Falls works intimately with the core precepts of photography –namely time, representation, and exposure – to create works that both bridge the gap.

The weather did the rest, creating large splashes of colour around each leaf as the rain lashed down. Clearly, location is as important to the outcome of each work as the process of time. Having spent his first five years in San Diego, California, the five-year-old Falls moved with his family to New England. He now moves frequently between the two cities, having also bought a house with his wife in upstate New York.

However, he seems currently to be spending most of his time on the sunny West Coast. The move West has definitely changed the way he works, he says. Once I moved to LA not only was it easier to have a larger studio than in New York, but I started working outdoors all the time. But part of the goal of moving to LA was to work on the sun pieces outdoors.

Falls paints these sculptures in incredibly bright, seductive colours, sometimes in a single vibrant hue, but often with each panel pulsating with a different zingy one. He coats their outside panels in uv-coated paint, while the inside panels are left uncoated. This means that the colours of the uncoated panels fade with the sunlight, and will eventually lose most of their colour.