LA Samuelson is an artist working in contemporary performance, sculpture and media. Their work follows the transmission of feeling across objects, sites and bodies, searching for new strategies to help us bear impermanence, and attachments to living and to one another.

Samuelson’s projects have been presented by MCA Denver, RedLine Contemporary Art Center, Understudy, Black Cube Nomadic Museum and the Denver Art Museum. They hold an MFA in Dance from Colorado University-Boulder (CU-Boulder), with secondary emphases in visual art and somatics, and a graduate certification in emergent technologies and media arts practices. They have taught interdisciplinary performance and artmaking at Hamilton College, CU-Boulder and Naropa University.

Samuelson’s fellowship project, Telegraph Valley, is a performance and installation work that centers the friction at the heart of two overlapping ideas: that humans “have” physical bodies while also somehow “being” physical bodies. Assembled from roofing material, multiplayer cassette tape loops, rotating light sources, (de)constructed liquid transmitters (an early ancestor of the landline telephone), plywood, house frames, rudimentary electricity experiments and a dancer, Telegraph Valley uses this friction to reverse-engineer the feeling of having sent out and/or received a message through the medium of one’s body, vibrate memory through matter, recirculate human intimacy through connection with analog and digital technologies, and communicate with the dead. During their fellowship, Samuelson will investigate how experimental approaches to image frame rate and motion capture can be used to animate the queerness that lives inside this friction.

In addition to support from the Movement Lab Fellowship, Telegraph Valley is made in conjunction with the National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project, co-commissioned by RedLine Contemporary Art Center, and in partnership with Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator (DVCAI), square product theatre and NPN.