Rami George in "and one day will tell you so many stories"
By LINDSAY COSTELLO
The research begins in a typical way. A cursory Google Images search for “Samaritan Foundation cult” brings up forty results, which feels almost too manageable. I sort through photographs of a neglected building, surrounded by empty trees. Then there are curious snake-like symbols, and a cartoonish, shadowy figure crouched in a corner, his eyes wide. Click, click, click. The story widens, titillates. A mysterious death, a haunted house, vampires, New Age. Sensationalized blog posts about the Samaritan Foundation seem fragmented and rife with half-hidden truths. The missing link is that which is too often missing: lived experience.
Philadelphia-based artist Rami George’s satellite exhibition and one day will tell you so many stories casts light on the realities of life within the Samaritan Foundation. I gather from their interview with Bomb writer Laura Brown that George’s experience with the Foundation began in the early 1990s, when their mother moved her children to Guthrie, Oklahoma to join the community, which was based in a building once called the Black Jail. George’s father later filed for custody and won. He brought the children back to Massachusetts and then to Portland, Oregon, following an ashram. George’s earliest memories are of life in the “monastery” building in Guthrie, now a hotspot for paranormal research.
While cults and intentional communities are often rendered one-dimensional and zany, George reckons with the complexities of these spaces, hinting at how they connect with universal human desires for kinship, meaning, and belief. George’s billboard structure and video essays help map the artist’s interactions with the Samaritan Foundation, while also laying bare the cult’s development and the hauntings left in its wake.
Installation view, Rami George: and one day will tell you so many stories, Paragon Arts Gallery, Portland Community College, September 25, 2020–February 21, 2020. © 2020 Rami George. Photo: Mario Gallucci.
and one day will tell you so many stories is installed in Paragon Arts Gallery’s windows. Speakers fixed overhead pipe audio outside. I standstill on the sidewalk, gazing in at each piece from my spot on the busy street. It feels like a small defiance, exposing and uncomfortable, and that forced interplay is important. “The Oklahoman obtained a copy of the writings, which cautioned believers not to talk on the telephone because vampires can gain access to them,” a disembodied voice in George’s video Untitled (Saturday, October 16, 1993) says. At that moment, I see a reflection in the window’s glass of a couple walking behind me; they glance at the video, then me, before ducking into the Indian restaurant next door. Something about this viewing experience finds resonance with George’s work. It’s honest, yet triggers an instinct to avert one’s gaze. Were I indoors and alone, the install would feel more polite, sequestered. That wouldn’t be quite right.
Rami George, Untitled (mapping), 2020. Inkjet print, wood, 84 x 96 x 28 in. Image courtesy the artist. © 2020 Rami George. Photo: Mario Gallucci.
George’s billboard structure, Untitled (mapping), is installed separately from their video works. The conceptual map traces meandering trails between pieces of ephemera. News articles and advertisements lead to images of stairwells and dogs. There’s a crater, a plane, angels. Connections between these disparate images end in spirals and outlined shapes reminiscent of the Samaritan Foundation’s illustrated publication Virtues, Laws, and Powers. Like dreams, there are no solid conclusions, just hints of relationship that rest on the tip of the tongue. Sometimes there are dead ends, too. The piece feels like a physical manifestation of memory’s true nature, twisting and unsure, with small bursts of clarity. Childhood memories can feel like dreams or vice versa.
George’s artistic trajectory bears a notable resemblance to experimental filmmaker Allen Ross’s work. Ross, the husband of Samaritan Foundation founder Linda Greene, attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where George later earned a BFA. There’s a whole documentary about Ross’s later disappearance and murder, but his experimental film work is sadly difficult to find. Staring at the coils on George’s billboard-map, I’m again reminded of how histories intertwine, sometimes repeating themselves to create intergenerational patterns of trauma.
Untitled (mapping) provides a tonal preview for George’s videos, which are installed in a bank of windows further down the sidewalk. I struggle against the same inclinations I felt during my Google Images search. I want the video works to create context, fit the billboard’s images into a neat narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. Would that be possible? Or would George’s visual memories continue to create spirals, ever-expanding and contracting? The answer is, well, both and neither.
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Rami George, Untitled (Samaritan Foundation) (still), 2014. HD video, color, sound, 5:46 min. © 2020 Rami. Image courtesy of the artist.
Untitled (Samaritan Foundation) is simple enough at first. The video utilizes Google Street View to focus on the Foundation’s so-called “monastery” in Guthrie, Oklahoma, moving slowly around the building while a composed, faceless voice narrates its ghostly history. The viewer learns that the building was one of the Midwest’s first Federal Prisons; this “Black Jail” was made of limestone and dark brick. The Samaritan Foundation repurposed the space in the early 1990s, using it to practice and house members, including children like George. It’s now purported to be haunted by a former prisoner and a young woman who sings. The video offers a straightforward history lesson that evolves into a tale of traces left behind, but it’s also a subtle illustration of George’s persistent ghosts: their earliest childhood memories, their mother’s search for spiritual meaning, and their family’s work to transcend this experience. The perspective on screen moves backward and forward, refocusing on the decrepit west Noble Avenue “monastery” from varying angles, over and over again. It is a memory replayed, viewed from all sides, as though it wants to process and understand itself.
Rami George, Untitled (Saturday, October 16, 1993) (still), 2015. HD video, color, sound, 5:00 min. © 2020 Rami. Image courtesy of the artist.
Untitled (Saturday, October 16, 1993) follows a similar structure, rotating through a series of images from The Oklahoman while a voice reads from their 1993 article outlining the Foundation’s unsettling beliefs and the George family’s custody battle. The voiceover reveals some grim details—there’s talk of zombies, the Antichrist, and an intelligent, multilingual mother who “must be hypnotized”—yet this video feels less personal than George’s other works in the exhibition. It’s as though the fully-exposed account becomes more distant, more difficult to look at head-on. Untitled (Saturday, October 16, 1993) simulates the perspective of the outside observer, with all of the strange, voyeuristic privileges such a role allows. As with many moments with George’s work, I’m grateful for the discomfort; it reminds me that I’m navigating the complex hallways of someone else’s memories.
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Window installations are subject to reflections and shadows, ambient noise, and other interruptions from our active external world. These influences happen to work to the exhibition’s benefit. I’m acutely aware of the voices from both films as they layer over each other, intermingle, and braid together with car brakes and chatter and wind. Nothing is a straight line; I am forced to notice my physical place in the world as I simultaneously engage with George’s works. The experience is a cyclical path. Here I am, vulnerable, standing in front of an unassuming building on an unassuming street, looking at Google Street View footage of an unassuming building on an unassuming street.
It’s another reminder that experiences tend to repeat themselves, and therein lies a spiritual truth. George understands the value of revisiting the past through ephemera. They reconstruct and re-map their memories in spirals of research encompassing the academic, the slippery, and the anecdotal. The results feel like generous, forgiving gestures toward an ancestral reckoning.
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and one day will tell you so many stories is open through February 21, 2021. The satellite exhibition was organized by Laurel V. McLaughlin, independent curator, with support from Elizabeth Bilyeu, Director of the Paragon Arts Gallery, and Mack McFarland, Assistant Professor at the Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) and Director of Converge 45. and one day will tell you so many stories opened in conjunction with the group exhibition Networks of (Be)longing, October 16–December 6, 2020, at the Center for Contemporary Art & Culture, PNCA.
Lindsay Costello is an artist, writer, and herbalist-in-training in Portland, OR. She is the founder/editor of soft surface poetry and the co-founder of Critical Viewing. She has written art criticism for Hyperallergic, Art Papers, Art Practical, and many other publications.