| I started working with light so that I could take the spatial and color concerns of my painting into a different realm. By developing a vocabulary of various lighting technologies, reflective materials, and structures, I’ve created works that fully activate their surrounding areas. I focus on both object and space, exploiting walls and other surfaces, as well as the work’s surroundings. My window installation, Diaphany, at Mixed Greens Gallery in New York in the winter of 2008-2009, used the building’s architecture as its starting point. It incorporated the windows’ mullions, sills, and fire escape into its geometry. |
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Carol Salmanson
I started working with light so that I could take the spatial and color concerns of my painting into a different realm. By developing a vocabulary of various lighting technologies, reflective materials, and structures, I’ve created works that fully activate their surrounding areas. I focus on both object and space, exploiting walls and other surfaces, as well as the work’s surroundings.
My window installation, Diaphany, at Mixed Greens Gallery in New York in the winter of 2008-2009, used the building’s architecture as its starting point. It incorporated the windows’ mullions, sills, and fire escape into its geometry. A total of 2,642 LEDs joined with the hard edges and soft blends of gel filters to change the experience of the urban street.
The wall piece, Luminous Layers, uses different colors of LEDs beamed through prism rods for a jewel-like effect. They are nestled into angled stainless steel to create multiple reflections. These three pieces work together to amplify each other’s effects and create a warm, inviting sensation from what should be a cold, sterile material.
My most recent work, All That’s Left, was shown last winter at the East/West Project in Berlin. It consisted of ten boxes with LEDs embedded into reflective sheeting and backlit with white light, to depict brick fragments. They transformed the heavy feeling of salvaged masonry into an evocative, ethereal experience.
All of my work is about the unspoken intricacies of human interaction, which I learned to observe to compensate for a hereditary hearing problem. Like the best theater, which captures hidden dynamics to go beyond words, the work explores the energy in subconscious perceptions and calculations, the things you see and know without realizing it. Information intersects with emotions to create a specific kind of knowledge that is nonverbal, precise, and intense.
