SOURCE OF ALL HAIR, WEARER OF ALL SOCKS:
SAM MODDER- AUGUST 2025
SOURCE OF ALL HAIR, WEARER OF ALL SOCKS: SAM MODDER
AUGUST 8- SEPTEMBER 7, 2025
EXHIBIT RECEPTION- AUGUST 8, 6PM-8PM
In “Source of All Hair, Wearer of All Socks” Modder combines storybook with mural, creating narrative installations that serve as an allegory for our contemporary condition, confronting questions of power, exploitation, and resistance.
In fairy tales, the villain is always easy to find. Evil is conveniently located in a single entity. She is identifiable, and once removed, all damage is reversed. Unfortunately, life isn’t so simple. Evil intermingles in systems and status quos. It is reasoned, taught, and internalized.
In this series, a Black woman escapes from everything but herself, and yet the world she and her duplicates create soon begins to mimic the one she left behind. There is no other here, no easy-to-locate oppressor. Just systems and greed, rupture and hope. This Black-only imaginary is less utopia and more speculative test lab, a way to decenter broken realities and focus instead on the imaginary to help understand and rethink oppressive structures.
The work presents two forms of power: socks and hair. In this world, socks are scarce. Since they can not be produced but only pulled off other inhabitants, they become a prized commodity -one that is bargained, fought, and systematically harvested for. To accumulate socks is to accumulate power; the “Wearer of All Socks” is the ultimate manifestation of this point.
While the socks are visually heavy and grounded in most scenes, hair, by contrast, is light and gravity-defying. Sprawling out from a seemingly passive, lying-down figure, the giving of hair does not require the same labor that the taking off of socks does. In this world, Black hair is alive, a creative force that sprawls and enters into spaces of possible confrontation and rupture.
Modder works figuratively in pen, collage, and digital media to portray larger-than-life Black female characters taking up space in real and imagined worlds. She positions her practice within the speculative practice of the Black imaginary-a centering of Black dreams and fantasies to create alternate spaces of both comfort and confrontation. These spaces are Modder’s way of decentering broken realities and focusing on the imaginary to help understand and rethink oppressive structures. Black hair in particular serves as a powerful protagonist in her work, pushing the narrative forward in soft curls and defiant shapes. As her work towers above you, Modder hopes you will step back into a space of childhood, wonder, and possibility. That you would, in the best of ways, feel small and open, ready and willing to hear one more story.
