AVATAR Series - 2004-2005: Digital art on thermal inkjet media

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In late 2004 Sal began working in digital media, first in Photoshop and then in Apple's iMovie. The Avatar Series is a result of her early experimentation in this new, unfamiliar medium. These images reflect trends of her most recent paintings coupled with Photoshop's abilities to blur, duplicate, recolor, and morph digital images from their original forms into something totally different in appearance, yet still somehow recognizable. She will use digital media of various forms during her Masters of Fine Art degree program as production tools and for conceptualizing new painted works.

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L.I.P.S. Series
Lips are packed with nerve endings, creating one of the most sensitive areas of the body. The words behind the acronym L.I.P.S. could be luscious, loving, intimate, Internet, passionate, powerful, sexual, or sensual. L.I.P.S. is about passion, desire, chaos, change, and determination. Passion for the need to feel alive and emotive. Chaos, the breeding ground for the magic of change. Desire to express our sensually alive selves. Determination for what we want to become.

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L.I.P.S. draws from and decodes images from Sal's earlier works. Love Letters, War, Passion Play, and Internet Love are pulled apart and reassembled, pushing the mind/body connection toward a desire for deeper holistic understanding of the authentic body/voice.

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CYBER Series
We shall sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and boldness.
We shall extol aggressive movement, feverish insomnia, the double quick-step.
We declare that the world's beauty has been enriched by a new beauty-the beauty of speed.
-Marinetti's 1912 futurist manifesto

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Cyber Series imagery is true to Sal's work of the last 5 years. Figures and Objects in Action, staying attuned to authentic voice, often with the presence of danger lurking close by. Images of bondage serpentining their way around a figure, suggesting a connection possible in the midst of innocence. Fragments of text and elements from travels are interwoven as the shift from Self to Society takes form. The paintings are laden with images expressing the ocean of dichotomies in which we swim, making choices which appear unimportant but are, in the end, life-shaping events. The real and the unreal collide. At the center of Sal's life and art are the processes of communication.

This series if fueled by love letters created by alias identities for Internet romance, curious in new technologies of passion play. She believes art should make us question what is happening in the world around us.

Sal is continually drawn to her classical training in Italy, where the roots of figures in motion took shape, alongside the Futurist manifesto of speed.

As we embrace new technology the struggle to stay involved with the tactile world becomes more challenging. Knowing when to pull the plug is key to the world of computers. The currency of this age is information, the ned for community involvement and people becomes more important, as man and machine coexist. The work celebrates the realm of the sensual, keeping emotions alive in a world of machine technology and corporate power, discovering ways to unite the inner fire and ice of intellectual skill and emotional expression while remembering the wisdom of the body.

Click here for the Cyber Series Gallery