Sam Shoemaker’s work embodies multiplicity, both literally and metaphorically. Living organisms, from fungi to insects to human beings, inform Sam’s practice, which looks to craft ecosystems and forge proprietary connections. He approaches his works as a process of designing and engineering a system, a “game” of cultivating and sustaining heterogeneous environments.
In Sam’s recent works, fungi offer an expansive means of exploring these themes. Mycelial networks are composed of complex and sophisticated organisms, their connections and interdependencies often invisible to the untrained eye. The artist acts as caretaker and steward, carefully orchestrating the conditions for growth and maintaining homeostasis, developing and sustaining a system which in turn expands and contracts in myriad ways. We experience these works as both biological objects and metaphors for the entropy of a life cycle, their varying forms reminders of the unknowable ways in which a subject may grow, connect, and change.
Sam Shoemaker (b. 1991) is a Los Angeles based artist and amateur mycologist working across several mediums. Sam received his BFA from CalArts in 2014. In 2015, Sam founded the gallery JACE SPACE and curated over a dozen exhibitions before receiving his MFA from Yale University’s sculpture program in 2020. Sam's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Currently, Sam is developing a laboratory in Los Angeles for the research and cultivation of sculptural, medicinal, and edible mushrooms.
