Nora Salzman

Nora Salzman
MFA Painting

Nora Over Reuben
Blank Man Masking
Nora as Reuben Breslar

"Painting provides a place to create a contained realm for the impossible. In painting, there is a complicit agreement between the viewer and artist to suspend disbelief and believe together the shorthand of the painted world. Umberto Eco said that “the American imagination demands the real thing, and to attain it you have to fabricate the absolute fake.” I build everything from the ground up and record it. The cyclical usage of sculpture in conjunction with photography and painting lends a real-world credibility as opposed to the pure artifice in painting alone.

The balance between revealing the artifice I create and suspending disbelief rests on the fulcrum created by the translation between mediums. This translation dissolves given assumptions inherent to any medium. For instance, photography still connotes the literal recording of reality while painting has become the place for fantasy. My work travels cyclically; one medium informs the content of its neighbor.

The process I have cultivated is low-tech. I built a blank sculpture, photograph it, then paint atop the print. The advantage of photography is that I can print multiples to mutate in infinite ways with paint--this is where the social/sexual content lives. I then re-photograph it so that it becomes a thing that now exists in “reality.” The sculpture, painting, and photographic processes I employ make the body a container that you can pour yourself into or project yourself upon in order to become it and expresses the fluidity of gender."