Guts

In a shimmering, mirrored interior, an endless white apartment block seems to rise up and plunge downward simultaneously. The space within each layer is populated by an unsettling yet fascinating array of objects: amorphous bodies, snakes and crabs, junked furniture, shiny blue fabric. Created in 2022 and partly reflecting the artist’s experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, 'Guts' is an extraordinary essay in beauty, turmoil, anger and pathos by Los Angeles-based artist Samara Golden. Evoking the stratified layers of class in America as well as the layers of a conflicted mind, the shelves in the installation also reflect Golden’s desire to create, in her words, ‘an impossible space’ -- an interior whose fractured and vertiginous perspectives evoke the contradictions of contemporary life. The ‘guts’ Golden refers to in her title could simply be the interiors of these dwellings or offices. To have guts also means to have courage. To spill your guts is to tell the whole truth. But crucially, guts are the slippery innards that reveal the health of an organism. To ‘get to the guts’ of something, as Golden seeks to, is to penetrate to the heart of the problem.