Samara Golden's Mirrored Bedroom Installation Puts You in the 6th Dimension

At first glance, Samara Golden’s The Flat Side of the Knife looks like a topsy-turvy structure straight out of MC Escher’s Relativity, but a few words from the creator reveal that her latest installation inside MoMA PS1 is much more than an optical illusion. Her work is an entryway into what she calls the “6th dimension,” a construct she developed for dealing with confusing and overwhelming emotions.

For The Flat Side of the Knife, which appears tonight as one of a series of attractions at the art space’s seasonal, A Night at the Museum celebration on Saturday, January 31, Golden afixed an array of meticulously designed bedroom and living room sets to MoMA PS1’s ceiling. A mirrored floor acts as a portal into this 6th dimension, which creates the feeling of looking straight down into a stranger’s house and guessing about them based on their possessions.

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“Each object has a different spectrum of possible meanings,” she tells The Creators Project. “The only thing that is consistent through all of the objects is that they are personal to me, and have meaning to me.” A wheelchair trapped on a staircase, a family of stuffed animals, and a group of guitars are spread throughout the inverted building, each hiding stories and emotions from the artist’s past.

Many of Golden’s installations take the form of these dreamy, studio set-like domestic arrangements, including Mass Murder and The Fireplace, but The Flat Side of the Knife eclipses them in both scope and surrealness. Each of them not only tells one story, but several narratives at once, each of which changes as frequently as Golden does herself. We asked the artist about building The Flat Side of the Knife, the 6th dimension, and how she figures out what her installations actually mean.

The Creators Project: Firstly, could you explain your use of symbols in The Flat Side of the Knife?

Samara Golden: I work in a pretty intuitive way. I think of all the individual objects as things that need to be in the piece in order for the piece to build up enough momentum to feel like the place that I envisioned.

I like things to have multiple meanings so, in terms of symbols, I think I would say that I want an object—lets say a wheelchair—to have many meanings in the piece. Each object has a different spectrum of possible meanings. The only thing that is consistent through all of the objects is that they are personal to me, and have meaning to me.

Take, for instance, the guitars: one way to see it is that I always wanted to be a musician, but never really took the time to learn all the skills necessary to be fluent in that language, so for me the guitars could be seen as “aspirational” or as stand-ins for failure. Also the guitars could be seen as a tool that is not being used, or as the possibility of sound, or they could just be objects sitting around in a domestic way.

Another way of looking at it is that I often favor certain points of view in my installations. Sometimes I see these the elements in the “view” like a composition in a painting. If you think about the work that way, then the guitars can be a compositional element, almost like a stroke of paint, an anchor in the composition, or something that is necessary to hold the visual plane.

This is your biggest installation so far. What were the biggest challenges in planning the installation?

The biggest challenge was trying to envision how the reflections would work before actually working in the space. This was the first project that I ever made a model of beforehand. Then the real biggest challenge was doing all the math and logistical stuff to be able to make the stairways and big sculptures out of a fragile material in real life.

I learned a lot about engineering, building things, and hanging things, which was amazing, but very hard, as I was definitely working outside of my comfort zone in every way. I have a lot of levels of detail in my work, and it took a lot of time, energy, sweat and tears to make the big elements. Then there were all of the small detailed handmade works: the wheelchairs, the guitars—which had to be resined—sewing and stuffing the animals, plus the video and sound. It was a lot to figure out in a pretty short time; I was working in a makeshift studio in the building next to PS1, and there were some funny problems, like how I couldn’t get some of the elements out of the room after they were built, and the building had two water pipes that broke. One flooded my video mixer a couple days before the show opened—it was a little crazy.

What was the most gratifying part?

The most gratifying part was seeing it in real life. At the end of the installation I was looking down into the space from the railing above and for one second I felt like I was looking into the model. It was disorienting and I felt so lucky that a lot of what I imagined actually happened, and that everyone came together to make the thing happen. I couldn’t have done it without the excellent help of the install crew at PS1. It was really special to have an opportunity to work with those people and I felt like we all did it together.

How did you first come up with your conception of the “6th dimension,” and how does it apply to Knife?

I was looking for a way to describe myself. I’ve always been someone who gets easily overwhelmed, with physical stuff and with mental stuff. For a long time I thought I was trying to make work that could be a way of thinking about “confusion,” but whenever I described it that way, people didn’t really understand.

I like the idea of making a place that can hold emotion. I guess I really started using the term “6th dimension” after making an installation called Bad Brains in 2012. The installation was on Randall’s Island in NY for the Frieze Fair. The curator thought it might be interesting if I used the history of the island as a jumping off point for the piece—the island had been an insane asylum and a potter’s grave among other things. Ultimately I just couldn’t stop thinking of the pain and suffering that had happened on the island and then since I’m not really a research based artist I had to think of what my own pain and suffering has been, and somehow my mind kept on going back to suicide—not my own suicide, but the suicide of people that I have known.

The 6th dimension concept sort of came out of these ideas: I thought of the island as being one place, then the place where I grew up as being another place, and I thought of all of places where things happened in my life. A lot of places held a lot of emotion, and I wanted to find a way to put all those places and thoughts into one location. I saw it as a fanning out of time and space. I liked the idea that emotion was the only thing that could pierce through these layers.

I thought about the Bad Brains installation as a place for those lost souls of people who couldn’t make it in this world, people who killed themselves, to go, a place for them to be. There was a lot of sadness in that piece.

There are a lot of very serious scholars on time and space, I was just taking a pale version of how they describe things and using it to get closer to being able to describe what I was thinking about. I realize that what I’m saying might seem confusing, or even contradictory, but I’m interested in those two things, and am better at manifesting it visually than in words.

Your installations are very cinematic in appearance; they often look like surrealist movie sets. Does film affect your creative process and if so, how?

I watch a lot of films, I like the way they can take you somewhere and also they way they can make you feel something. On a basic level film also puts a frame on the world and then lets the viewer see what the filmmaker sees, and I think that kind of manipulation is interesting.

In my recent work I tend to have a view that I want people to see it from, but then I also let it fall apart from the other views. I like the fact that the illusion can be broken in a way that is different from the way it can be broken in film. I think films like Jean Cocteau’s Orphus, and Blood of the Poet, had a resonance with me, for their ability to break through a certain reality.

In the same vein, I recently re-watched Tarkovsky’s Solaris, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and The Truman Show within a couple days of one another. In their own ways each film breaks it’s own reality, and there is confusion, disappointment, sometimes hope. As a kid and teenager I was really interested in alternate reality, and also the idea of seeing what someone else sees. I saw a film called Brainstorm when I was eight that really influenced me a lot, which followed the story of scientists making a piece of headgear that could record your feeling thoughts and sensations. In the end one of the inventors of the device puts it on as she dies of a heart attack, and the movie tries to create what the death experience is like by making bubbles of memory that float by the camera like spaceships in a sci-fi movie.

I think the idea of manifesting many things at the same time, or seeing many times at once, or being able to drill down through different levels of reality has always interested me. It’s a subject most often explored in narrative forms like books and film, but I’m interested in how these ideas can be convocated into a physical place in a non-narrative or a multi-narrative form as multi media installation.

Tell me about the narrative structure of your artwork?

I would say that there are many narratives, or I have the narrative inside of me and what you see are segments, moments of that narrative all jumbled together with other moments. The only thing that I find to be necessary is that the feelings are real for me. Its not just arbitrary choices, everything is something to me, deeply. That said, I’m not really interested in having the viewer feel what I feel or see my narratives; I’m more interested in whether there is enough momentum built up by the piece that someone else would feel something, but my hope is that the feeling and narrative would be theirs

How does this installation reflect the psychological spaces of your mind?

To be honest I’m not sure. I did an installation at MoCA in LA that was called The Fireplace (2014), and that piece was most certainly a ‘thought.’ It was a cyclical thought brought into the physical world about insomnia, thinking bad things, and not being able to get out of that cycle. I was lucky enough to make that piece twice—first in NY in 2013—and through making it again I was able to understand what it really was.

Knife has not been around for long enough for me to know what it really is. I like the idea that your work can teach you something about yourself, so right now I’m just waiting to get the distance to have perspective on it.

Right now I see the piece as being three levels: The top level is the peach bed loft, signifying reality. The middle level was the upside-down green surgical bed, which is reflected in the mirror to look like a loft that hovers above a white living room: the level between life and death. The the bottom level is a bright white living room that has windows looking out to the an ocean projection. It is supposed to be a peaceful place, a place for thinking, a unconscious space, or maybe a place in your mind. It was also death to me, or the release from earthy stress.

If you think about the piece in this stratified way then the whole thing becomes a space in your mind. I almost died when I was 30 and what I experienced is very directly related to the structure and organization of the piece and the specific elements inside of it.

How do you hope or predict people respond to Knife?

My hope would be that the works would inspire people to feel something, maybe even something that they can’t explain. My hope is that they would feel connected to the work somehow, and that they would feel that the work is their piece. I say that because for a long time I felt very alienated from “art”, museums, galleries etc. I felt like I was supposed to know something that I just didn’t, so I slowly drifted toward music because music lets you in, it lets you feel something, and that something is in you. It acts as a door that opens out to your own emotions, and sometimes film does the same thing.

My goal—if I have one—was to make something that I feel something true and genuine for, and my hope is that in the making of that, that others will be able feel like they inhabit the work, like it’s theirs in the same way that someone might say “this is my song!” when they didn’t write it or sing it, but listened to it and made it theirs in their mind. Its a powerful thing to be able to do. I think I’m just scratching the surface of what I could do in the future, and so far I feel like everything I’ve made is a pale version of what I strive for.

What does title of the installation mean to you?

Titles are the hardest for me, and this one came along pretty late in the process. I liked the way it sounded and the way it looked on paper, and I like the idea that you are taking a item that is usually used for violence and talking about the harmless part of it. Another way to say it is that you are thinking about a different use for an otherwise violent object. I also like titles to be in conflict with the work, or at least to not be obviously connected so it remains kind of open, like a poem that can’t exactly be resolved, or an unsolvable math problem.

Now that Knife is installed, what other projects are you working on at the moment? I’m going to be in London in late April re-staging an installation that I made in 2012 at the Zebludowicz Collection for a show called 20 years of collecting, then in May I have a project in NY (that not allowed to disclose yet), and then I have a solo show at Canada Gallery in September.

The Flat Side of the Knife is exhibiting at MoMA PS1 through August 30, 2015. It is one of a series of attractions at the art space’s seasonal, A Night at the Museum celebration is this Saturday, January 31. Visit Golden’s website to browse through more of her installation art.

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