Tomio Koyama Gallery Roppongi is pleased to present an exhibition of works by Sam Falls.
Having participated in several group exhibitions in Japan in 2025 at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, the Simose Art Museum and Taguchi Art Collection, Sam Falls will present new canvas, ceramic, and sculptural works in his second exhibition at our gallery.
About Sam Falls and his work
Symbiotic: 1. Involving interaction between two different organisms living in close physical association.
2. a cycle of rich existence connecting artist, nature, and viewer through a kind of harmony between nature, exposure, and time
Sam Falls has developed a symbiotic approach to art, connecting aesthetics and the environment in depthy by working in close collaboration with the atmosphere, plants, light, time, and natural chance.
Sam Falls collaborates with the natural environment to produce his art, working primarily outdoors with plants and the atmosphere. Inspired by the history of art from themes of mortality and symbolism in early painting to the site-specificity and minimalism of land art, Falls pushes the mediums of painting, sculpture, and photography in a more organic and primary connection to these subjects. By engaging directly with the elements of sun and rain to make the work, Falls works symbiotically with the environment to intimately represent nature and create art that speaks to our place within it.
Falls lays his canvases out on forest floors and fields, composes pruned local flora on the canvas, spreads water-reactive pigments over the piece and leaves it undisturbed. Moisture from rain, snow, fog, or morning dew come into contact with these pigments, causing a diverse range of movements to appear across their surfaces. These canvases are left out for a period ranging from one night to months, depending on the piece, while the expressions that appear on them change based on the weather and environment at any given moment. This entire process is repeated to create multiple exposures that depend on the weather and plants of the season and location. The colors are initially used didactically to create an image of variation and detail, followed by attention to the colors of the season and plants of the area. Overall, the concept and intention is set in place while much is left to the hand of nature, from the wind spreading the cast dyes in the air to the movement of water across the canvas on uneven ground or slopes.
“For example, while Donald Judd built a town in nature and Heizer actually constructed a city, I work more in line with camping… Like “leave no trace” camping. I coexist with nature, I am inspired by it, collaborate with it, but I bring back everything I brought there and leave the land as I found it for the next animal or person to encounter it undisturbed.” *1
Falls creates works by becoming an artist who is “symbiotic” with nature and the passage of time, allowing viewers to experience the beautiful, abstracted presence of nature, bringing the outside in, as well as encouraging the viewer to return outdoors maybe with a new eye or curiosity.
Falls initially studied physics and eventually ended up making art in order to connect with reality and the world through experience rather than mathematics. Initially he worked with photography but was frustrated by the distance in time and space from the creative act to the object being viewed. A photograph of a landscape was transferred to film and then paper and then presented behind glass in a frame. This led falls to abandon the camera and all photo-material, taking just the conceptual precepts of time and exposure, working outdoors with the actual material that the viewer would encounter, creating a “primary source” that carries with it the impact of time and weather. Also, working directly with the elements there is no professional mediation of cameras, darkrooms, technology, or printers – the viewer is immediately familiar with the subjects and mediums (plants, time, sun, rain) and has their own relationship and history to these that they can bring with them to the work itself. This enabled him to express a kind of cycle of rich abundance that exists between artist, nature, and viewer.
About this Exhibition and Falls’ New Works
Tackling New Forms of Artistic Expression and the Exquisite Joy of Living in the Moment: Time, Life, Death, Nature, and the Present
Falls’ new “Ikebana” series was inspired by ikebana flower arrangement works created for an exhibition at Sogetsu Plaza organized in collaboration with The North Face in 2025. The ceramic components feature flowers and plants embedded in wet clay and fired, followed by glaze and glass used in a second firing. Influenced by his experience with Sogetsu, Falls has now included vase-like elements on the works for installing flowers. These works feature arrangements of fresh flowers from Tokyo that connect the works to their exhibition in Japan. In addition to embodying the ephemerality of life and the cycles of nature in a multilayered fashion, the works take on a life of their own through the arrangement of local flora as it changes through the seasons.
The “Bellows” series consists of rain paintings that Falls made in his own garden in Los Angeles. Based on what can be seen through the bellows of a large format camera, the central image is one exposure to the rain and weather, around which is a double exposure to rain, the elements, and resetting plants, which in turn is surrounded by an external border consisting of a triple exposure of plants and rain. These works are a visual representation of his depth of field and Falls’ creative process, along with an homage to the lasting influence of film photography as it continues to disappear from the practice of professional photography.
The sculpture Tower of Light features “runs” of ceramics set within aluminum i-beams. Each line of ceramics are composed of plants collected from a trail-hike in Griffith Park – Los Angeles’ public nature preserve. The organic material and subject matter refer to both a time and place of natural experience and creation, while the structure that holds them create a juxtaposition as i-beams represent the common building blocks of modern architecture in urban development. This relationship speaks both to the modern human life of our organic bodies so often contained in geometric spaces, as well as the inversion of minimalism so often used to outlast nature and almost stand against it – they are an effort to warm up this cold aesthetic that is intelligent design but lacking feeling. Standing over two meters tall, it exudes a mysterious force, as if the light emitted by the plants themselves were reaching upward.
“Sun Fade” is from a group of naturally hand-dyed works made outdoors with sunlight over a long period of time. These works are made by using natural dyes from cochinelle to sequoia seeds (as in the work here) and then sewing on plants to the canvas and leaving it outside over the course of spring, summer, and fall. The sun fades the color away yet the plants create a ghostly image as they retain their withered form, speaking again to the passage of time and mortality while preserving a hope within color, representation, aging. The restrained palette is reminiscent of black and white photography as well as the boldness of natural color, history of representation, and the intensity of sunlight.
“I think an important element in my works is ‘melancholy,’ which I believe is the best word to describe it. It does not mean total sadness or darkness; instead, I find a hopefulness in this emotional content that deals with the passing time……Growth and decay. For me, this combination is the heart of the matter.” *2
Sam Falls continues to explore the deeper reaches of major themes such as time, life, death, and nature, while constantly challenging himself with new techniques and modes of artistic expression. We hope you will take this opportunity to come to appreciate his latest worldview, which conveys a sense of the true joy of living.
*1 Shigeo Goto, “First Conversation: Interview with Sam Falls,” THE ONE THING THAT MADE US BEAUTIFUL, Art Beat Publishers, 2024
*2 Interview with Sam Falls, “SAM FALLS SYMBIOTIC,” THE NORTH FACE / Spiber, 2025
