PAF013Sam Falls, Geological Time (Healing Tree), 2026

Light, time, and the natural world—these are Sam Falls’ primary materials. Across many modes including paintings, textiles, and installations, Falls draws on the conceptual precepts of photography as a method for capturing the ephemeral. Rather than stilling a single moment, as in a photograph, the artist maps the movement of natural light over time, attentive to the mutability of the surrounding landscape. In this sense, his work draws on the legacy of Land artists such as Nancy Holt, for whom sculpture was a frame or vessel for the heightened transmission of energies such as light, elements like fire, or cosmic and seasonal patterns. His intent, as he noted in relation to a past work, is “to ride the pulse of ambient geological time and give an image, a portrait, of light and space as it passes through the vulnerable permanence of natural preserves amidst western growth . . . perpetuating the experience and sharing it.”

For Powder Art Foundation, Falls has created a site-responsive installation in dialogue with both the particular landscape of Powder Mountain and a playful, decades-old practice in ski resorts across the country. This irreverent tradition, in which skiers mark a chosen tree with items such as beaded necklaces and undergarments tossed from chairlifts, results in a vibrantly ornamented landmark that records the ritual of returning to a singular site. Falls’ Geological Time (Healing Tree), 2026 comprises 2000 feet of precious gemstones such as tourmaline and labradorite wrapping an aspen near the Hidden Lake Lift. Like the practice he references in this work, Falls’ sculptural installation marks seasonal time and human presence in the landscape. However, his materials, formed over millennia through geological processes, come from deep within the earth. Their crystalline surfaces refract light at various times of day and, over the course of seasons, in relation to the changing foliage responding to the environment that forged them. Across history and geography, many cultures have invested the types of gemstones presented here with healing properties. Falls extends this notion beyond its human-centric application: rather than nature serving as a resource for human benefit, what if these healing properties were applied back into the landscape itself? Woven through a living aspen, natural light moves through the stones to the benefit of all that it touches. In doing so, the gemstones become an offering to the very ecosystem that created them, making present the possibility of nature healing nature.