Carol Salmanson

INTERVIEW WITH WEST 10TH STREET BLOG (in conjunction with the window installation Village Square)
from: http://w10w.tumblr.com/post/77304975437/get-to-know-carol-salmanson

Art-in-Buildings: You began your career as a painter; what precipitated your transition to working with technology? Do you think technology allows you to achieve something painting cannot?  
Carol Salmanson: My paintings were concerned with energy and movement, and technology lets me use light to intensify that experience. Light’s spatial qualities allow me to build whole worlds with color and shape. The first way that we experience space is through light; it forms our response to it on direct as well as unconscious levels, so combining light with other more traditional elements allows me create fictional worlds even when I am using abstraction. Light also allows me to play with scale. The brightness and rich color of LEDs radiate out into their surroundings in much the same way that sculpture does, carving out volumes even though their sources are very small electronic components.  Scale is often thought of as being experienced in relation to the body of the viewer; with LEDs, the light is large-scaled even though the source is not, and can evoke a larger range of sensations in the viewer.

AiB: Your work often allows the viewer to see the process of creation (via exposed wire, etc). Why do you do this? 
CS: When I first started working with light, I made work that was very fabricated, as a response to the industrial nature of the materials.  I was also enthralled with the new-found ability to create entire spaces with installations, not to mention the thrill I got from successfully  learning how to make highly crafted objects. The resulting work was architectural, as a lot of my installations and sculptures still are. But underneath all of that was a gestural painter, and I missed both the lyrical act of moving my hand, and seeing the effect of my hand in the work.  It took a long time to find a way to add that element; technically, my work is not simple to make, and finding a way that isn’t and doesn’t look tedious took a while to pull off. The result has been gratifying, because the work bridges the chasm between technological, manufactured materials and the handmade. 

AiB: What influence does environment have on your work? 
CS: It’s impossible to work with light without affecting the space around it, because that’s the nature of the medium.  It’s also one of the reasons that I wanted to work with it.  I studied a lot of dance, which, obviously, is moving through space, and working with light was a way to address that through visual art. In dance you use your body to draw shapes, and you evoke responses by the way that you make the movement; the way I use light, it’s color, shape and line.When I’m working with a specific space, I want to create a dialog between the space and the work.  The form tends to be architectural and therefore geometric, because it’s a response to the three-dimensional geometry of its environment. Because I’ve been using a vocabulary in the last few years that comes from my paintings and drawings, the work has been gravitating toward two-dimensionality in physical structure; “Step Lightly” in the stairwell of the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey had 800 LEDs wired together and hot-glued directly onto the landing’s wall.

AiB: How did working within the space constraints of West 10th Window influence your work?  
CS: The depth of the window on West 10th Street was its most interesting feature. I have done a number of window installations, and they’ve all been two dimensional in feel, although there was physical depth that was required for backlighting.  I thought that was the wrong response to the West 10th Street window, because it was small and flush with the sidewalk: I didn’t want it to feel insignificant. The way I addressed that concern was to make three layers of LEDs and wire, receding back into the window.  The alternating direction of the wires make a drawing almost like graph paper, and yet there’s no doubt that Village Square has depth. It’s added a whole new element that I’m excited to use in the future, and I’m in the process of developing ideas.

AiB: Are there any artists in particular whose work has informed yours?
CS: Jennifer Tipton’s lighting designs for dance made me see the power of light, and seeing Robert Irwin’s work made me understand that it could be transmuted into visual art, as did Dan Flavin’s. The way Keith Sonnier draws with neon, functioning simultaneously in two and three dimensions, was an influence that I’m only now coming to fully appreciate. Byzantine mosaics are huge in my universe, as are Persian miniatures: one form massive and one tiny, and both equally powerful.

AiB: What’s next for you?
CS: This spring I’ll be having a two-person show at Brian Morris Gallery on the Lower East Side, and I’ll also be in a three-person show at Key Projects in Sunnyside, Queens.  I’ll also be working on a commission for the permanent sculpture “Spiral Exchange” in downtown New Britain, CT.

CAROL SALMANSON: FROM PAINTING ABOUT LIGHT TO PAINTING WITH LIGHT 

from: http://theengineinstitute.org/carol-salmanson-from-painting-about-light-to-painting-with-light

Posted on February 4, 2013 

I started working with light and reflective materials in 2003 to take the spatial and color concerns of my painting into a different realm.  Light’s unique ability to touch both mind and feelings let me build emotional spaces that resonate with memory and experience.

Light both beams into you and envelops you. By amplifying and radiating color, line and form outward, into and around the viewer, I can build atmospheres in a way that goes beyond painting’s two-dimensional limitations.

I first became aware of what light could do from seeing it on the stage, at dance performances when minimalist choreography reigned.  There were no sets and the dancers wore unitards, so the lighting served simultaneously as costume design and set.  Jennifer Tipton’s lighting was breathtaking.  I contacted her to ask where I could study it, and she generously invited me to sit in on technical rehearsals.  To process what I had learned, I had to forbid myself to paint, only allowing myself to do something, anything, with light.  During the ensuing paralysis, I took long walks throughout Brooklyn for a few months until ideas emerged.

My first show with light, in the PS122 Hallway, was in an old building with very little power available. Since I was already making the large leap from paint to light, I had been reluctant to learn the electronics required for energy-efficient LEDs–but now I had no choice. I am fortunate to count as a friend Larry Dunn, who is a theatrical lighting engineer. He swore he could teach me what I needed to know in an afternoon. I brought us lunch, and the lesson began.

I had first started working with under-the-cabinet fluorescents that I could get at Home Depot, but it didn’t take very long to realize that they were too heavy and bulky to do much with. I discovered the lightweight and slim electronic-ballast fluorescents around the same time that a shape of metal kept appearing in my mind’s eye. I walked into a lumberyard and drew it, and learned that it was a channel used to house wiring in walls and ceilings, called Chicago bar.  I got some and then Larry taught me how to work with LEDs.

I started beaming LEDs into the bends in the Chicago bar and watched them multiply. I then placed a piece of hexagonal prism rod over them, and saw that it blended the lights. In this way, I could mix the six available colors of LEDs.  I then wrapped gel filters over the electronic ballast fluorescents and placed them behind the Chicago bar.  The end result was the vocabulary of electronics and optics that formed the series “Luminous Layers.”

Working with light doesn’t always require electricity. In 2007, I found prismatic hexagonal reflective sheeting, a recently-introduced material that picks up and intensifies ambient light for road signs.  It comes in eight colors, and does amazing things. The surface seems to disappear endlessly into space, while at the same time reflections are visible on the surface.  I’ve worked a lot with the sheeting, and combined it with LEDs and fluorescents both because of the color effects I can get, and also because it doesn’t require a dark environment to provide a rich experience.  An example of this is “All That’s Left,” a series of boxes resembling brick fragments that I first showed in Berlin, which has patterns of colored LEDs embedded in the sheeting’s surface.

This past fall, I showed “Hercules Lite” in an exhibition of site-specific installations curated by Karin Bravin at Lehman College.  It was based on the massive central column in the lobby of the Marcel Breuer-designed building. I replicated it in green fluorescent-edged plexiglass on the glass wall that separated the gallery from the lobby, using neodymium magnets to hold it in place.  This transparent plexiglass sends ambient light to its edge, casting a glow onto the floor and ceiling, allowing me to use light and suspension to contrast with Breuer’s sense of weight.  It was the first time I had used this material, but it will definitely not be the last.

For the first years, the industrial materials limited me to working with straight lines. I had been a gestural painter, and eventually I wanted to bring back in the evidence of my hand, and my calligraphic brush strokes. By accident, I had discovered that if LEDs were placed closely behind diffusion, their wiring cast beautiful shadows, almost like gray pencil lines. I embedded LEDs on both sides of diffused plexiglass, and the resulting wiring on both sides created drawings.  I had already been collecting surplus LEDs because of the variety of shapes and sizes I was finding. As technology had been evolving, so had applications for these LEDs, most were now obsolete, and gorgeous.

I have more than forty-five different kinds of LEDs, some of them still made, but most not. The older ones are dimmer, so they all needed to be calibrated to a consistent brightness before I could use them for my “Gesture Drawings.” Some of the works use only one kind of LED, but others use almost all of them, and by looking closely you can see the great variety and beauty of things that were manufactured for industrial purposes. This work is, in a way an homage to the history of LED technology, a transformation of things high-tech that have outlived their use.

I feel very fortunate to be alive at this time in history, when technology goes into the development of the industrial materials I use.  For me, the trick is to make sure that the technology doesn’t overwhelm the art, so that I can convey the magic that I find in light.