Arts and Letters

Sam Contis (b. 1982, Pittsburgh, PA) considers the way bodies and landscapes converge. Phases, an exhibition of two interconnected works, continues that investigation and presents a three-channel film installation and photographic portrait series made with teenage cross-country runners in rural Pennsylvania.

Five Kilometers, Contis’s first major film, follows the faces of three girls as they run a 5K cross-country race through the Appalachian landscape. It is composed of three single takes, each one beginning with a shot from a starter pistol and ending after the runner completes her course. Each runner occupies a separate time—morning, midday, evening—but, in the gallery, the runners seem to move in unison, the sound of their breathing and footfalls filling the space. Phases, a sequence of twenty-four black-and-white photographs, accompanies the film as a parallel motion study. Contis made these intimate portraits as the runners approached or crossed the finish line. Both works explore running as ecstatic movement and performance—they are portraits of endurance that knot the anxiety and desire often projected onto young women. In them, one witnesses the way bodies moving through time become, for Contis, a way of telling time, their motion determining the shape and structure of her work.

This exhibition, Contis’s first institutional solo show in New York, offers an original perspective of running never before pictured on film. It is impossible to look away from the discomfort and intimacy of Contis’s vision.

Arts and Letters commissioned a fictional text, “Your Time Is Your Time,” by Kathryn Scanlan, which accompanies the exhibition as part of our Reader series. It is composed from interviews Scanlan recently conducted with runners Contis collaborated with over the last seven years. On November 2, Contis and Scanlan will be in conversation to launch the publication.

The film starts every half hour on the hour and its runtime is 26 minutes.

Phases is organized by Jenny Jaskey, Chief Curator, and Noa Wesley, Assistant Curator. Support for the exhibition is provided by Thomas and Susan Dunn, the Hillman Foundation, Christine Bernstein, and members of Arts and Letters. Thanks to the Aperture Foundation, Danielle Dupre, Kristina Kite, Meyer Sound, and Sony Pro Audio for additional support.