Sam Samore - "Scenarios"

The series of photographs, entitled Scenarios, continues Samore's exploration of the relationship between cinema and painting. The large film grain created for these images makes for fields of abstraction evoking an expressionist sensuality of the picture-plane. Slow-motion effects are evoked through the illusion of focus shifting and motion-blur, giving all of them an emotionally charged, uncanny and dream-like atmosphere. In Scenarios, Samore stages and directs the actors as anti-heroes/heroines within fictional episodes suggesting such genres as film noir, spy thriller, urban western, contemporary tragedy – while referencing the painting of Caravaggio and Manet. Close-ups of the faces suggest psychological isolation. A feeling of spatial dislocation derives from unusual vantage points – there are times when the figure appears to be laying down or floating/hovering. In addition to concentrating on each individual as a character in a drama, Samore continues with his trope of the extreme close-up – images of an eye and lips. The exhibition as a whole can be viewed as a collection of jump-cuts, the story remaining incomplete and unfinished.