Excerpt:
An installation by Samara Golden, one of our most original and interesting artists, places viewers on the edge of a strange, debris-filled ocean.

There are exceptions, of course, but painters tend to work within a four-sided, right-angled format. That’s their arena. Samara Golden, one of our most original and interesting artists, works with different givens. She begins with shaped interior rooms lined with mirrors and takes it from there.

She’s not especially interested in mirror tricks, like those created by Yayoi Kusama and her Infinity Mirror Rooms. Rather, she wants to create what she thinks of as “impossible spaces.” Places that don’t exist on Earth, and where the laws of the world we live in don’t necessarily apply.

Golden, who is based in Los Angeles, has a new installation at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas (on view there through Jan. 12). You might have seen examples of her installations at the Whitney Biennial in New York in 2017. I saw a particularly mind-blowing one at Sydney Modern in Australia in 2022.

At the Nasher, Golden has created an “impossible” underwater realm by starting with a mirror-lined wedge of space, shaped on the horizontal plane like a pizza slice, with vertical mirrored walls that create a wraparound effect. The viewer approaches the work, titled “if earth is the brain then where is the body,” and looks down into a strange aqueous scene. But what you see is a mirror reflection of objects Golden has installed above, suspended from the ceiling, and separated from us and visually obscured by a layer of “waves” made of melted plastic.

What you see is redoubled by the mirrors into an impression of depth and unity — and yet it doesn’t quite add up. Golden said of one of her earlier works that it is like a “mind with different thoughts happening at the same time…”