Sal at
her most recent showing.
From Sal Strom's MFA Essay:
My art is fueled by research into the holistic body: anatomy and form, spirit and motion. My link with figures in motion begins with my family name, Strom, meaning flow or current.
Ten years ago I got divorced and returned to my roots, complete with skeletons. My renewed figurative studies juxtaposed loudly against my non-confrontational safe art. My purgatory of alcoholism and recovery inspired my new work. Art became the tool to overcome my past. Now I merge my wild adventurous side in gestural figurative art with my technically adept recovering self. My acceptance of dual identity forms a collaboration in creative action.
Three years ago I decided to study anatomy, craving inner knowledge of deep structures hidden by outer façades. I was invited to assist the dissection of three cadavers. This anatomy lesson, with its indelible images, merged the scientist and artist within me. I engaged in the painstaking process of skinning a human face, opening muscle and sinew to the bone, separating testicles from a penis. Death became a metaphor for life and the beginning of a desire to decode traditional artmaking.
Searching for an anatomist-artist drew me to the medical illustrator Frank Netter and to my current muse, Gunther von Hagens, in his Bodyworlds exhibition of plastination cadavers in movement. Muscles flayed in running poses, pole vaulters, skinned horse riders. Von Hagens provokes ethical outrage in his detractors and impassioned dialogue on the body politics of social taboos. I now want to deconstruct the traditional rules I am proficient in, to reorganize my theories, and to build stronger concepts. I am drawn to the fluidity and sensual magnetism of the body, immersing myself in movement, dancing, swimming, running. Taking photographs of dancers and athletes freezes the strength and speed of body action in two-dimensional space.
My reading ability is the main challenge I must overcome, so I immerse myself in books, re-reading Monster/Beauty and Erotic Faculties by Joanna Frueh, and Helen Fisher’s The First Sex on the strength and power of elder women. I’ve learned to create tools to overcome distractions, to decode the energy of chaos caused by ADHD. I find visual inspiration in films with sensual imagery, Last Tango in Paris, Stealing Beauty, and Dreamers, and in the work of choreographers Merce Cunningham and Mark Morris. Intimate acts of tactile performance art by Janine Antoni and Ana Mendieta create erotically spiritual, transcendent bodies by their images of surprising absence.
At the center of my life and art I confront the pressures that reinforce body taboos. I strive to defy the neo-Victorian and puritanical mores to unify an open and honest spiritual awareness of the primal senses. Research for seventeen years of exhibitions, begins on an intimate level, an immersion in visual and emotional documents. Letters from my father-my muse-a fighter pilot in World War II and Korea, filtered into my war series. My Cyber series (2000) and L.I.P.S. (2004) are fueled by e-mails of love created by alias identities for internet romance in new techniques to express cyberfeminist passion.
A grant awarded to teach school teachers kinetic art led to taking classes in solution-focused art and dance movement therapies for traumatized children, in preparation for leading a three week fine arts program for orphans in Romania in 1996. I taught art to incarcerated youth through an Oregon Arts Commission grant in 2000 and designed a pilot program, “Gender Equality in Contemporary Art History,” for youth, elders and low-income women. Teaching adolescents at risk resulted in life-size paintings, layering the body systems, in “Anatomy through Art,” to inspire learning about the inner workings of physiology. Giving lectures for corporate venues, hospitals, and museums on the healing power of art through Arts and Humanities programs has shown me the extraordinary value of teaching.
To place the meaning of my work in an international context, I want to explore comparative art theories. I want to create performance art pieces to accompany my evolving paintings, merging art, science and action. I’m planning a pilot project, “Anatomy through Art: Knowledge, Transcendence, Abstraction,” to arrive at a painting imbued with an erotically spiritual presence. Building on impasto color surfaces of the San Francisco figurative school, I want to add a textural and tactile depth to my painting, and to energize my work with the gestural style of Susan Rothenberg in translucent layers. In Giacometti style, anxious drawing in paint, to convey the sensation of being crushed by technology and ground up by information overload. And start an oral history project to document the techniques of living Pacific Northwest figurative artists, Johanson, McLarty, and Backstrand.
I would like to attend art residence and research projects to focus on the primal region of the brain, the limbic system. Collaboration in making plastinated cadavers in action in Heidelberg with Gunther von Hagens could bring a revelation of the ways moving corpses can bring a powerful and unexpected sensation of life. To always seek the authentic inner voice, to exhibit worldwide, to lecture on the value of perceiving the wisdom of the body and the senses are my ideals. Using international venues to fuel my work, I go back to my cybercave world of kinesthetic paint. A study of the muscles in action reveals the luminous moment of mysterious grace that holds the essential electricity of our lives. To continually transform my process, that began as a 8 year old, taking nude photos of Barbie dolls in action.