July 10 – August 29, 2025
Opening Reception:
Thursday, July 10, 2025
6 – 8 PM
CLAMP is pleased to present “Jonah Samson | You Do Not Know How Longingly I Look Upon You,” an exhibition of recent works by the Canadian artist—his first solo exhibition at CLAMP.
“You Do Not Know How Longingly I Look Upon You” comes from a line from Walt Whitman’s poem “To A Stranger,” first published in the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass. The poem explores the fleeting connection of the writer and a passing stranger and functions as a meditation on loneliness, longing, and unfulfilled desire.
Working exclusively with his extensive collection of vintage gay porn and erotica, Samson’s practice is in many ways a similarly intensive rumination on looking at strangers longingly. The trove of print media the artist mined to create the works in this exhibition behave for Samson just as they did for their intended viewers when they were originally made.
These subjects and scenes still behave as sites of hunger and desirous looking, but in transforming images once meant for mass, immediate consumption into delicate, handmade prints, Samson slows the act of looking. The rapid release of pornographic imagery—the quickness of access, arousal, and abandonment is replaced by something more aching and prolonged. This shift to the aching rather than explicit is furthered by Samson’s decision to crop many of the source images to focus on the faces and expressions of the models.
By using labor-intensive photographic processes to create unique, monochromatic prints, Samson deliberately obscures the original state of the scene and instead reimagines these images not as consumable jack off material, but as meditations on memory, on intimacy, and on the persistence of longing. Samson’s images do not attempt to fulfill desire; they choose to linger within it.
Jonah Samson is a self-taught artist who has exhibited nationally and internationally. He presented a solo exhibition with Macaulay & Co. Fine Art in 2015, and his exhibition “Another Happy Day” (2013) at Presentation House was listed as one of the top 10 shows that season by Canadian Art magazine. Other exhibitions include “Otherworldly” at the Musée Eugène Leroy, France, and the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, and “Unearthed” at Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in the UK.
Samson creates work that merges photographic, filmic, and painterly processes. Absurdist theatre and literature are often referenced in his evocation of the bizarre and offbeat. He currently lives in Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia.