Phases

Sam Contis (b. 1982, Pittsburgh, PA) considers the way bodies and landscapes converge. Phases, an exhibition of two interconnected works, continues that investigation and presents a three-channel film installation and photographic portrait series made with teenage cross-country runners in rural Pennsylvania. Five Kilometers, Contis’s first major film, follows the faces of three girls as they run a 5K cross-country race through the Appalachian landscape. It is composed of three single takes, each one beginning with a shot from a starter pistol and ending after the runner completes her course. Each runner occupies a separate time—morning, midday, evening—but, in the gallery, the runners seem to move in unison, the sound of their breathing and footfalls filling the space. Phases, a sequence of twenty-four black-and-white photographs, accompanies the film as a parallel motion study. Contis made these intimate portraits as the runners approached or crossed the finish line. Both works explore running as ecstatic movement and performance—they are portraits of endurance that knot the anxiety and desire often projected onto young women. In them, one witnesses the way bodies moving through time become, for Contis, a way of telling time, their motion determining the shape and structure of her work. This exhibition, Contis’s first institutional solo show in New York, offers an original perspective of running never before pictured on film. It is impossible to look away from the discomfort and intimacy of Contis’s vision. Arts and Letters commissioned a fictional text, “Your Time Is Your Time,” by Kathryn Scanlan, which accompanies the exhibition as part of our Reader series. It is composed from interviews Scanlan recently conducted with runners Contis collaborated with over the last seven years. Founded in 1898 and located in landmark buildings in Washington Heights, the American Academy of Arts and Letters is an honor society of artists, architects, composers, and writers who foster and sustain interest in the arts. Arts and Letters’s members honor and support creative individuals through over seventy annual awards and prizes and champion experimentation and the breadth of contemporary art today through an exhibition program that gives artists space, time, and resources to realize ambitious projects. The program is led by Chief Curator Jenny Jaskey, in consultation with a committee of Arts and Letters artist members including Mel Chin, Charles Gaines, Ann Hamilton, Joan Jonas, and Amy Sillman.