This exhibition of work by David Samas features instruments fashioned from raw materials, for his chamber opera The Green Wood, a genre-bending sonic romp through the world’s forests. The Green Wood seeks to uncover the voice, point of view, and inner life of the forest soundscape as it evolves from the silence before dawn, through the ornate dawn call of the songbirds and voices of the rivers and trees, into the defining evening choir of frogs and wolves, ending in the stillness and reflection of the witching hours.
David Samas is a composer, cosmologist, poet, painter, performer, philosopher, farmer and father of 4; he is a practitioner and professor of arcane healing technologies and traditional magics, a field which includes massage, herbalism, hypnotherapy, psychoacoustics and shamanism. He has a BFA from the SF Art Institute in conceptual art and studied poetics at the New College of California, Vassar, Bennington, and SF State. As a young man he performed with the SF Boys Chorus, the SF Opera, and the SF Symphony with which he won a GRAMMY for the “best classical recording” of 1994. He also makes sacred geometry amulets and talismans, is an excellent cook, and self publishes small editions of handbound art books.