Every Exit Is An Entrance Somewhere Else by Jonah Samson

Working with vintage press photographs, Samson uses archival images as both editor and narrator, selecting and sequencing them for their capacity to generate meaning rather than illustrate a fixed story.

In 1966, Tom Stoppard first staged Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead at the Edinburgh Fringe. A tragic comedy, the play centres on two minor characters who appear only briefly in Shakespeare's Hamlet: a duo of hapless courtiers, here seen waiting in the wings of Elsinore as confused onlookers and unwitting participants in a tale in which their trajectories are pre-destined. In the play's opening scene, the two leads bet on the toss of a coin, a game of chance that frames the play's exploration of free will, mortality, and philosophical introspection.

In Samson's work, photographs act as stand-alone images, yet together they produce a loose narrative inspired by Stoppard's play. Skulls, gesticulations, and pointed fingers populate the work, adopting the iconic visual language of Hamlet, while anonymous figures are positioned as onlookers, echoing the role of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. As the viewer's gaze moves across the composition of images, chance becomes a method of reading, with meaning emerging through unexpected encounters between images.

About the Artist

Jonah Samson is a self-taught artist who has exhibited nationally and internationally. He presented solo exhibitions with Macaulay & Co. Fine Art in Vancouver, Clamp Gallery in New York, and his exhibition Another Happy Day (2013) at Presentation House was listed as one of the top 10 shows that season by Canadian Art magazine. His exhibition We’re the Heirs to the Glimmering World at Clint Roenisch Gallery in Toronto was reviewed in Art Forum.  Other exhibitions include Otherworldly at the Musée Eugène Leroy, France, and the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, and Unearthed at Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in the UK.

Samson creates work that merges photographic, filmic, and painterly processes. Absurdist theatre and literature are often referenced in his evocation of the bizarre and offbeat. He currently lives in Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada.