Connie Samaras.

CONNIE SAMARAS by Matias Viegener De Soto Gallery, Los Angeles CA October 6 * November 3, 2007

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Connie Samaras's "V.A.L.I.S. (Vast Active Living Intelligence System)" consists of photographs and videos she shot while on a prestigious NSF Office of Polar Services artist's residency at the South Pole in 2004-05. Not surprisingly, the resulting images are imbued with harsh otherworldliness. Antarctica, just like our deepest ocean rifts or highest mountains, is the closest most humans can come to extra-planetary travel. And like outer space, it is probably somewhere no one can travel to without dragging along preconceived notions. Samaras even compares the South Pole to Disney World, both for its fantastic, constructed nature and given how regularly and predictably it has been photographed.

What emerges from the U.S. science stations in Antarctica is both extreme and ordinary, like any place where people live and have a job to do. And yet if you get lost while out on a walk you are sure to die within minutes. Death is potentially everywhere, which may be why the stations, equipment, even the ice flows have a harsh poignancy. While some of the images have the razor-sharp iciness one would expect to find at the South Pole, others are strangely warm, like those wood sidings brushed against the sky like abstract paintings in Amundsen-Scott Station Phase 3 (all work 2005) and the jumbled stacks of books on communal library shelves.

A professor at UC Irvine, Samaras's show is both didactic and "speculative," which is her term for this kind of outworld landscape (the acronym "V.A.L.I.S." is adapted from Philip K. Dick's gnostic trilogy and his own paranormal experiences). For all extents and purposes, the U.S. research base at the South Pole is just like a space station: Cargo and Tunnels, South Pole captures the settlement's Quonset huts half-burrowed into the ice sheet like life-seeking tentacles. There's an echo here of Samaras's earlier work on UFOs, Star Trek conventions, and extraterrestrial visitations.

"V.A.L.I.S." documents three generations of U.S. research stations: the 1950s wooden structures already buried under the ice and barely visible in outline; a 1970s geodesic dome slowly sinking into the permafrost; and the new station still being built, this time on pylons that will help to keep it raised above the gradual buildup of ice. Nothing here lasts for very long. The ice wins, but humans never stop inventing ways to bypass it. Not only does it swallow up everything, it constantly drifts, so that even the South Pole refuses to stand its ground.

Each built trace reflects unique generational characteristics, such as the loopy optimism exhibited by the geodesic dome, whose New Age potential Samaras emphasizes in the only digitally altered image of the show, Dome Interior, South Pole. Mirrored right and left, the work assumes an eerie, nearly religious symmetry, whose spell is at once broken by the presence of Santa-red sleeping quarters, which to the outsider look just like frozen meat lockers. Underneath Amundsen-Scott Station reveals the new building's flexible pylons, ready to be jacked up as the ice rises, but also resembling the undercarriage of a spaceship about to blast off.

Shot on medium- and large-format cameras, Samaras's photographs are extraordinarily crisp, as if taken without the impediment of an actual atmosphere. Setting off the station pictures are a few key ice landscapes, like Day/Night Divide, Polar Plateau, which here looks more like a jagged desert sea. Often radio antennae are the only signs of human or natural intervention, the disorientation they cause somehow reminding us that whenever you are at the southernmost terrestrial point, every direction is thereafter the same, inevitably pointing north.

Two videos complete Samaras's show. In a single unedited, static shot, one captures a seal coming up for air through a hole in the ice, while the other shows a male station hand asleep on a transport plane. Deceptively simple, these videos are out-of-body meditations on what it takes to survive here. The seal nearly jumps out at us in a threnody of raspy exhalation, whereas we barely hear the man breathing, only the creaky rocking of his hammock over and above the sounds of the airplane's noisy engines. In other words, the "breath" of Antarctic Man is inescapably tied to the vast technology of survival, while the seal's intense sovereignty gives it license to range far beyond the fragile perimeters of technology and temporary bivouacs. It's tempting to see these videos as existential or even environmentalist statements, but in the end they downplay the extraordinary spectacle of this place by reducing it to that most ordinary of living functions--the room to breathe.