Catalog Essay by Seph Rodney for the exhibition On and Off and In-between,” scheduled for March 2020 and postponed because of the CoVid pandemic
“On and Off and In-between” greets you with sculptural works made up of light-emitting diodes (LEDs), the reflective sheeting typically found in road signs, and gel filters that tip the illumination towards transcendence, or don’t. The works designed by Salmanson for the two series Light Spill and Lightshift and displayed here are crafted to move between poles of feeling and meaning. When the colored back lighting is turned on and the ambient light is dimmed, the work imparts a feeling of the room becoming hallowed, a space of contemplation where you want to move slower and with more care. They convey, as the artist says, “a spiritual element.” But when the works are off and their environment is brightly lit, they look like playful combinations of rudimentary shapes — the kind a child would use to begin to ascertain the complexity of form and volume in the material world by starting out with basic building blocks. Squares and circles pigmented in primary and secondary colors make up intuitively quirky geometric patterns and impart a playful pop quality. In one lighting scheme the emotional register of the gallery moves toward a mood of consecration, of being set apart from the quotidian world with its insistence on mundane substance — you might float free. In the other, the world is very much corporeal and tangible, but it is also a place to imaginatively explore combinations of shape and color — you might stay to play.
Salmanson began to work with the medium of light in 2003, when it felt like she had taken the manipulation of it through her gestural painting practice as far as she could. Beneath a desire to make work, as she says, “that moves in space” lies key aspects of her personal history. She has long been a lover of dance, beginning her amateur tenure as a child learning ballet, eventually moving on to study modern dance into her 40s. Additionally, Salmanson had an ad hoc mentorship with the theatrical lighting designer, Jennifer Tipton. Being guided by how Tipton lit stages and sets to evoke a variety of atmospheres, Salmanson developed a sensitivity to how light interacts with space to impel the emotions of viewers. And the artist had her own transformational experience through visiting Ravenna, Italy and Palermo, in Sicily where she encountered Byzantine mosaics, which she considers the original light art. There is a moment in a cathedral where the sunlight gleaming through a window made an altar seem to levitate — and she found herself lost in that light.
The paintings displayed in the succeeding room all began with the gesture, which is about wanting to make painting move in space. The gestures build up; they accumulate, become a skein of curling arcs, softened virgules placed on their sides, flattened phalanges of pigment that taper at their ends into a line so thin it feels like the paint is letting its voice trail off into a whisper. And then there are the riot of colors gathered together — a range that teases the eye to recognize them and name them. Seen in portrait orientation these paintings seem like some piece of the cosmos busily about its own business of morphing into its next stage evolution. Regarded in landscape they become forests, impenetrable jungles that teem with its own fecundity. If you choose to focus on one hue then that color comes to the forefront and all the others recede, but looked on as a whole one can understand what Salmanson means when she says that with all her compositions, “Everything is to find balance.” They balance but do not cohere, a host of tireless angels dancing.
In both the paintings and the light works, Salmanson shows rather than tells us how she makes movement happen with essentially stationary objects — demonstrating the aesthetic and emotional shifts carried out through electric illumination and the motion carried through the gestural application of acrylic paint. Salmanson’s exploration began with gestural painting that harnessed light, lavished it on with paint, and later she poured it through diodes. You get the sense of her seeking her own balance between these poles of meaning, of material, of practice, of presence, all the while willing herself to stay and play until it’s found.