Sam Contis: Moving Landscape
In an Australian first, the Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA) presents Moving Landscape, an exhibition by internationally acclaimed US artist Sam Contis. Featuring 85 works from three major series—Deep Springs, Overpass, and Cross Country—the exhibition spans twelve years of Contis’s evolving photographic practice.
Contis is known for her dynamic approach to photography, exploring how place and identity are constructed. Shifting between black and white, colour, and varying scales, her images piece together fragmented perspectives to reframe how we see bodies within their environments. Each series invites viewers to reconsider the relationships between movement, time, and terrain.
Deep Springs subverts the iconography of the American cowboy through sensual, earthy imagery in a California–Nevada high desert valley. Overpass explores public footpaths in the English countryside through darkroom prints that evoke motion and bodily presence. In Cross Country, high school runners race through rural Pennsylvania, embodying transformation, rhythm, and endurance.
Curated with Dr Anna Arabindan-Kesson, AGWA Senior Research Fellow, the exhibition reveals how Contis interrogates gender, place-making, and identity through the lens of photographic history. Her work invites us to question familiar narratives and imagine new ways of seeing ourselves and the landscapes we move through.
