Love Letters - 1995: (collage, monoprint, drawing, painting)
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Love Letters began as an exploration of intimacy, love, sexuality, and acceptance. The image size is small to create a close, personal dialogue between the viewer and the work. Collage recreates our own layered personas. Torn paper reveals and obscures secret places on the path to understanding our deepest feelings: pleasuare, pain, initmacy, love, and shame. Yesterday's scars, parts of ourselves still unknown or too disturbing to embrace.

Stamps are symbols of approval and disapproval by society or ourselves. They seal these messages to the heart and soul. Love letters are about the choices we must make in life. They are about coming together in healthy relationships while being true to yourself. They are about the strength and courage it takes to be vulnerable. They are about intimacy and isolation, eroticism and spirituality, resistance and release, repulsion and attraction.

Like all love letters, Sal hopes these send signals that trigger a deeper understanding of who we are, what love is, and what it takes to be a whole human animal.

Click here to view Love Letters - Part 1
Click here to view Love Letters - Part 2

Passion Play - 1998: War Women

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Passion Play is a body of work about our life's energies coming together throught our spiritual, sexual, and crative selves. Much of this work was created in Hungary during an artist residency program. My muse for this series is my father, a fighter pilot in WW II. I see his passion in life, flying, and his destruction when his passion was denied him. The war heroes in my work are women being placed in the workforce and the new independence forced upon them. Is it the beginning of a new sense of freedom for them? The men return and the women are happy to be homemakers, or are they to be a perfect mix of all talents? Once the mindset has changed, can they go back to being the same as they once were, before the transition?

All this brings me back to the present and the constant challenge of women being pulled in many directions, hopefully always tempered by a deep desire to be true to ourselves. What does the war hero, his women, a former communist country and a divorced and remarried woman have in common? A new-found sense of freedom a changed mind, constantly redefining and reevaluating whiat is important. How to live life within a new set of rules. Transitions are often difficult and stimulating. I use Plexiglass and acrylic to portray these transitions. The glass icon paintings of the past and the everyday use of plastics in the present. Working on the reverse side of the plexi, the first is last and what is shown at completion. As the process moves forward, less and less is exposed. The smooth surface is conductive to the sensual feelings I hope to convey. I want to leave the first response of the first thought, the first image, the core that all else is built on.

Click here to view the Passion Play Gallery

Living on the Edge - 1998: Acrylic on Plexiglas

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Living on the Edge began as Sal was noticing the ever-changing landscapes around her on a physical and psychological level. The impact of running in the woods, then one day her woods were cut down. The metaphors she personally relates with the sudden death of the forest. In life we work at an ever increasing pace in a culturally driven society but in the end only our spirit lives on. The idea is that one event can radically change our lives forever. Even though we celebrate our continued sense of freedom and movement, the threat of danger is still lurking nearby. Sal's images expressthe ocean of dichotomies in life, as we struggle to be passionate and loving human beings, while keeping our own identify intact in a technology accelerating world. Not dissimilar to the displaced animals when their homes are destroyed.

 Following in the tradition of glass icon paintings from Eastern Europe; yet adding the contemporary material of plastic in the world of today; she works on the reverse side of the acrylic sheet. The first is what is shown in completion and as the process moves on less and less is exposed, leaving the initial response of the first thought, the first image, the core that all else is built on. Layering the paint like personas to reveal secret places on the path to understanding our deepest feeling: fears, joys, turmoil, rejection, acceptance. Freezing emotion and motion in time to empower our indomitable spirit through our creative selves.

Click here to view the Living on the Edge Gallery

War Series - "Chase the Free"-1999: mixed media-watercolor, pastel, collage, drawing

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The War Series, also known as Chase the Free, Angst and Ecstacy, is an homage to Sal's father, her muse, who fought in WWII, the Korean War, and finally the War of Returning to Society. In the wake of the recent political atmosphere of the Gulf War, the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, and the continued onslaught of technology, Sal's work entered a new dimension with Chase the Free. Her art explores the epistemology of her life. The artist's visual language is free to speak outside the standard "bell curve" of consciousness, between the world of illusion and delusion, to spaces that are often uncomfortable for an increasingly homogenized society.

We live in a world fascinated with weapons and the power they possess. Strom's guns are icons from her past used to empower our own inner strength. The personal "revolution" takes place as we live in the moment, while past and future collide. This process liberates us as we overcome our personal fears.

As Strom spent time in Eastern Europe, visited concentration camps, read and re-read letters from war heroes, she began to understand the freedom these men helped create for others, often at the cost of their own lives or their will to live. The lives they saved as young men and the toll it took on many of them is brought to awareness with phrase inserts from the letters.

"If I ever get out of this place alive I will pretty much have lost all hope in humanity." "We lost another guy today, he made a mistake, you just don't make mistakes here." "I'll return decorated or dead." The truisms in combat could not be further from the truth in daily life.

This ia a metaphor for the challenges of balancing work, home, and family while staying sensual, spiritual, and creative. The freedom to follow ones' inner voice and the strength to do so is the lifeline to the soul's power. The demanding complexity of the outer world is juxtaposed against the need for a rich inner life that feeds the soul. Facing our fears on an emotional level frees one to conquer the war within as she seeks to find the true, authentic self.

Strom was inspired by Fauvism with its bold arbitrary color, the Expressionist which stresses the psychological and emotional content in art, and Futurism which is characterized by the movement and speed of industrial life. Strom's work captures this feeling of explosive energy through the visual of dancers with weapons. These movements began in the early 20th century in reponse to the rapid change of industrial transition while reinserting the need to be connected to the human spirit.

By confronting the past and future in the present one achieves the power to release the authentic self. With our pulsating life force, one discovers a rich and fruitful life which embraces all dreams. The illusion of body will leave in time as soul transcends to a place where weapons can do no harm and the spirit lives in the eternal now.

Click here to view the War Series gallery