Arts and Letters

Each season, Arts and Letters commissions new texts to accompany our exhibitions as part of our Reader series. For Sam Contis’s Phases, we asked writer Kathryn Scanlan to create short fiction inspired by Contis's work with teenage cross-country runners in rural Pennsylvania.

Scanlan interviewed runners featured in Contis's photographs, drawing from these conversations to build her text, Your Time Is Your Time. Like some of Scanlan's previous works, it constructs fiction from existing material.

To celebrate the publication of Your Time Is Your Time, Sam Contis invites Scanlan to discuss their collaboration and the connections between their artistic practices. Both artists share a common approach: taking fragments from everyday life and transforming them into something strange and new.

The conversation takes place at 4pm and is free and open to the public. Reservations can be made here. Copies of the Reader Your Time Is Your Time are available free of charge at the event.

Sam Contis (b. 1982; Pittsburgh, PA) first started making photographs as a teenager, around the time that she joined her high school cross-country team in rural Pennsylvania. Some of her earliest photographs were of her teammates at practice. She was fascinated by how the camera gave her a way of picturing the world through an iterative, continuous process of looking. In the photographs, films, and books Contis went on to create, she has explored seeing itself as its own kind of movement. Many of her works investigate the movement of bodies through the landscape, including in California’s high desert (Deep Springs, 2017) and along the pathways of the English countryside (Overpass, 2022). Other works have considered the repeated glance and the kind of slow seeing that a return can offer, such as her book of images drawn from Dorothea Lange’s photographic archive (Day Sleeper, 2020) and her first major film, presenting three portraits of teenage runners, at Arts and Letters (Five Kilometers, 2025).

Kathryn Scanlan (b. 1980; Davenport, IA) is the author of Aug 9—Fog, The Dominant Animal, and Kick the Latch. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the Iowa Review Award, the Gordon Burn Prize, the Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction, and an Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as fellowships from MacDowell and the Jan Michalski Foundation. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in exhibition catalogues for artists including Ed Atkins, Mary Ellen Carroll, Sam Contis, and Robert Therrien, and she is a regular contributor to the literary journal NOON, edited by Diane Williams; her fiction has also been published in Bomb, Granta, Harper’s, and The Paris Review. This fall she is living in Chemnitz, Germany, on a scholarship from the European Capital of Culture.