Sam Linguist

Project Space

So you’re winding down an epoch. It’s a slow smolder––so slow you could miss it, only the seasons are so fickle; the planet groans and cities shake loose like teeth. Good species flicker out; sprawl creeps over every free blade of grass. The best years, according to the experts, are long gone and crystalline, while the forecast ahead reads grim for everybody but the outer space stakeholders. But it’s no time to get petrified, nor to ditch ship––it’s time to fashion a TV for the waiting room.

It is from this bunker of thought––borne of equal parts urgency and existential resignation––that Sam Linguist conducts his work. The pieces themselves, metamorphic and sturdy, are an exercise in absurdism, a reckoning with ongoing collapse. They’re ceramic, sure, but pointedly indelicate, stationed flush with their walls like miniature, fireproof televisions. Burned into the screen are trompe l'oeil twigs, dotted constellations and lone follicles of hair, calcifying outward from their surface and frothing up like static. One piece, bolted into place by metal scaffolding, surveils like muted daytime TV overhead. The resulting tableau is something alien and at once staunchly Southwestern, reminiscent of oxidized decay––the bones of football bleachers, moon towers piercing the dark like extraterrestrial spires.

Perhaps by some kind of serendipitous, environmental paranoia, Linguist’s paintings ultimately take the shape of hardy sculpture––pieces fortified to withstand some disintegration, some rumbling, some nameless, unseasonable trouble. Linguist’s works are a refusal of nostalgia, a joke poked at preciousness, an insistence on creation amidst slow-burning ruin. They’re souvenirs from an unfolding calamity––wry mile markers for the end of an age, screens tuned to one perpetual soap opera. They are evidence of one epoch’s twilight; they are early-laid bricks in a novel time zone altogether.

—Natalie Power, 2024

Sam Linguist (b. 2001, Waxahachie, TX) lives and works in Brooklyn. Recent exhibitions include Space Gas/Pie Fest: Esther Pearl Watson and Sam Linguist, Webb’s Fair and Square, Ft. Davis, TX (2023) and Piotr Kotlicki and Sam Linguist, Exiled by the Machines, Office Space Gallery, Salt Lake City, UT (2022). Linguist is an alumnus of The Yale Norfolk School of Art and received a BFA from The New School in 2024.