Connie Samaras/
Last Contact: Spaceport America and Edge of Twilight

De Soto Gallery presented Last Contact: Spaceport America and Edge of Twilight, an exhibition of photographs by Connie Samaras. Drawn from two distinct yet resonant bodies of work, the exhibition invited poetic correlations between visions of the future, constructions of community, and the metaphysical edge of known space.

Spaceport America (2010–2011) documents the eerily futuristic, often abandoned structures of the world’s first commercial space station. Located in Samaras’ home state of New Mexico—between the aptly named towns of Truth or Consequences and Las Cruces—the spaceport appears as a site suspended in time. Her framing emphasizes the uncanny everydayness of a place built to house humanity’s next frontier.

By contrast, Edge of Twilight (2010–ongoing) pulses with latent presence. Shot at night in an all-women, predominantly lesbian retirement community in the Southwestern desert, these photographs of trailers, palm trees, and quiet pathways are absent of people but steeped in their imprint.

Together, the two series explore architectural isolation, liminality, and the symbolic charge of landscape. Buildings emerge as thresholds—between present and future, life and afterlife, desolation and community. Samaras’s precise compositions, often centered on lone structures in barren terrain, resist narrative certainty and suggest instead a space where geopolitical, cultural, and emotional boundaries blur.

Connie Samaras works in photography and moving image. Her work has been exhibited at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, P! in New York, and the California Museum of Photography. A mid-career survey, Tales of Tomorrow, was presented at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena. She is a recipient of grants from Creative Capital, the Andy Warhol Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.