The full room installations by Los Angeles artist Samara Golden use biographical material to reproduce her moods and emotions. In The Fireplace (2013), the artist grapples with the plague of migraine headaches by replicating her lived experience of being overwhelmed and disoriented. Photographs and text written by Golden scroll anxiously while the artist herself appears both as a face on an urn and in outline as spectator. Rendered in anaglyphic 3D, The Fireplace suggests the existential crisis of finding balance inside an endless number of possibilities.

 

The Fireplace is part of Room to Live: Recent Acquisitions and Works from the Collection, now on view on MOCA Grand Avenue.