Barcodes: Merging Identity & Technology explores the shifting nature and
ever evolving aesthetic of perceived identity, filtered through rapidly
revised modern technology in an increasingly globalized world.
I incorporate new media with traditional techniques to represent the influence of ever-present technology in our world. The parallel evolutions of technology and nature converge in my work. Collaborations with experts in the multiple scientific and technological fields influence the evolution of my art, which is conceived and produced through research. Often originating in printmaking, my concepts drive my work in the direction of any variety of media including painting, drawing, sculpture, and sound.
For the past few years, I have been exploring the visual possibilities that arise as I digitize analog photographs, altering and abstracting their contents through the now antiquated technology of the fax machine. The resulting highly abstracted, linear images led to my current fascination with barcode technology, which provides a visual representation of everything from supermarket products to people while masking their essential identities. My new Barcodes series allows me to push my explorations into the loss of information and Identity and the effects of distortion through digitization into a more sculptural form. I will juxtapose these losses with the potential and promise provided by new technology, in this case through the use QR codes. QR codes imbedded in the work or floor will allow viewers to interact with the pieces and reveal the multilayer realities that underlie the work’s abstract surfaces.

I used auto-cad design systems and laser-cutting tools to allow me to carve extremely fine, complex designs through fluorescent plexiglass . These plexiglass forms will then be re-configured by layering them atop each other and, in some cases, embossed paper backgrounds. These central pieces will also be integrated with a full-scale installation integrated within the gallery’s walls and floors, creating a total environment that echoes the form of the ubiquitous commercial bar code. Activating the QR codes incorporated into the overall design will lead to videotaped interviews with a group of international artists.

Soledad Salamé
2011 Project Statement
Gulf Distortions


Gulf Distortions I-XII

On April 20, 2010, a drilling rig explosion triggered the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The impact of the largest accidental marine oil spill in the history of the petroleum industry has continued long after the well was capped.

Enormously upsetting, the disaster and its global repercussions led me to develop the Gulf Distortions project. I drove to Louisiana after the oil spill, during the initial clean-up efforts. I traveled from Venice to Grand Isle with my collaborator Michael Koryta, talking to locals and taking photographs. The military and the police kept us from getting close to the contamination. The British Petroleum Company hired the shrimp fishermen to clean the spill with the agreement that they would remain silent about the gravity of the situation. Still, we managed to capture images of the marshes, floods, the remains of the local shrimping industry, and the oil drilling equipment that litters the coastline. The manmade aspects of the environment were starkly at odds with the raw beauty of the bayous. Based on these signs of struggle, it became evident to me that humans had been fighting against nature to lay claim to the landscape.

To visualize my sense of environmental fracture and displacement, I manipulated the photographs that documented our encounter with this disaster, submitting the images to an intensely fraught facsimile process. I worked with the staff at the St. Francis Community Center near my studio to simulate a cyber traffic jam, sending a number of photographic images by digital fax to the Center’s fax number all at the same time. The effect was to overwhelm the Center’s analogue fax machine, causing the output of highly pixilated images. For me, the combination of old and new technology holds metaphoric weight. The fax machine distorts the images in the same way that the human hand disturbs and distorts the nature.

The facsimile has become essential to the development of concept and process in my work. I became interested with the facsimile’s aesthetic properties in 2009, when Baltimore’s Contemporary Museum presented the Independent Curators International FAX exhibition. For the project, My Precious Islands, I created and faxed to the museum mock-ups of real and imagined floating landforms. I annotated the images with “loss of self, loss of control, loss of preciousness, loss of cities” to communicate a point of view at once nostalgic and critical.

For Gulf Distortions, I-XII (2010-2011), I chose 12 images that represent my sense of the estrangement between nature and humans. I transferred the images from digital to analogue, altering and abstracting their composition through the antiquated technology of the fax machine. I screen printed the reiterated images onto frosted Mylar and detailed the oil spill by printing on silver paper and by the use of interference pigments.

“A soundtrack commissioned by the artist enhances the foreboding mood. Composer Brian Sacawa’s discordant sound component blends saxophone, percussion, machine and wind sounds to echo the contrast between the tranquil, grassy landscape, the active shrimp boats and the visually raucous oil machinery.” –Laura Roulet in catalogue for Corridor (p. 40)

The damaged topography of the Gulf region is reflected in the resulting fragmented still life scenes. On another level, these formalist views of disaster speak to the rupture of our relationship with the world just outside our window. Our increasingly distanced rapport with nature—for example, our dependence on the internet for eco-status reports—has a had a numbing effect that could explain why we take such enormous risks in order to generate and consume energy. Our sense of place has been altered and with it, our notion of accountability has broken down. The lessons from the oil spill should lead to the development of new energy technologies with a minimum impact on nature.

These are images of my latest work, which utilizes a combination of Monoprints, Solar Etching and Silkscreen printing to create heavily-layered, intricate prints.

The work is based on satellite imagery of cloud maps over the United States. I enjoy the idea that there is a constantly changing landscape of weather visible from above, while here below perhaps nothing changes. These works are a result of several years of research on satellite images of the earth, and as a development of my "Where Do You Live?" installation that I recently had at the Contemporary Museum.

"Soledad Salamé creates evocative works that reflect her passion for the earth’s natural resources. In her paintings, prints, photographs, and large-scale immersive installations, Salamé channels the energy and beauty of water, plant, and animal life to produce works that speak of global forces on both a micro and macro level. Organic forms often merge with digital referents, injecting Salamé’s seductive imagery with sobering concerns about alarming environmental science and the escalating presence of technology.
At the core of Salamé’s practice is a keen intellectual curiosity about the natural world and a love of research and discovery. Her interests have led her to the threatened forests of the Amazon, to the melting icebergs of Antarctica, and back home to the thousands of miles of eroding Maryland coastline. These visceral and awe-inspiring encounters with nature and first-hand experiences of the effects of climate change stir Salamé’s passion and inspire her forms.
In some of her most recent works, Salamé has focused her attention on the effects that global warming has on rivers, lakes, and oceans and what the future may look like if climate change is not addressed in our lifetime. Sinking islands in the Pacific, disappearing coastlines in the United States, and changing weather patterns around the globe, have all become Salamé’s ardent concerns and the source material for recent work. Satellite imagery from Google Earth and infrared images from weather research labs, for example, have become a significant part of her research and have found their way into her visual language producing works such as My Precious Islands (2009), Atmosphere in Blue (2010), and the recent large-scale installation Where do you Live?: Three Thousand Miles of Maryland Coastline (2009).
In Salame’s most recent work entitled Barcode (2010), technology moves from serving as her research and image-sourcing tool, to the subject of her work. In this series of silk-screened images on metal panels, the delicate shapes of small sinking islands are overtaken by a digitally produced and ever-expanding grid of a barcode. Distorting and abstracting with each panel, the barcode spreads out across each image, asserting the intensifying role of technology in our lives and its effects on the natural world. A ubiquitous machine-readable carrier of data, the barcode becomes the digital equivalent to the DNA code of every living organism. Executed in eerie hues of acid green, Salamé’s Barcode leaves us wondering which force—nature or technology--will prevail in the end and whether we even have a say in the matter."
--Irene Hofmann, Director, Contemporary Museum, Baltimore

My work reflects my passion for the earth's natural resources and the people interaction with the landscapes. In my paintings, prints, photographs, and large-scale installations, I channel the energy and beauty of water, plant, and animal life to create images that speak of global forces on both a micro and macro level. In my recent works, I turned my attention to researching and exploring and effects that pollution and global warming have on our rivers, lakes, and oceans and what the future coastline may look like if global warming is not addressed in our lifetime.

Where Do You Live? is a dramatic 16-foot-long map of Maryland and its coastline. Created using a composite of hundreds of images from Google Earth, map, which is layered with elements of extensive research on the population, pollution, and increasing water levels along with the nearly 4,000 miles of Maryland's coast. The abstracted image of the landscape, coastline, and cities of Maryland offers a sobering view of the effects of pollution, a warming planet, and rising waters.

Contemporary Museum press release, 2009.

I am fascinated by the idea of images in Science Fiction, of people living under water, but now, this fiction is becoming a reality. Using satellite imagery, I work with a miniature mockup in my studio, physically with water to show the possible futures of our coastlines. One of my projects focused on Venice, which is heavily endangered by rising sea levels. I have also worked with images of the Baltimore Harbor.

My next project, a mural titled "Where Do you live" ?
3000 Miles of Maryland Coastline", shows the possibility of flooding of coastal cities form Westernport to Ocean City. This project has two parts. For the first part I have selected five images to represent an area of coastline that is fifty three miles wide by 30 to 105 miles high. These five images are deconstructed and rearranged, creating an abstraction, and collaged to a silver background. The mural will be 8 1/2' tall by 18' long.

Using the collage as a mockup, the second part integrates water, so that cities and water become one. The collage is then photographed and printed on Mylar, with each section hand-colored and printed on metal. The end result is a mural that is eight feet tall and sixteen feet wide, with eight panels that are each four feet by four feet. This work may also function as a landmark, to see what changes may occur to the Maryland coastline over time.

The funds from the Baker award would be used to produce the project, part of which will be displayed at the Contemporary Museum next spring 2009 as part of series of exhibitions that explore the environment.

As an example of what I intend for "Where do you live?" 3000 Miles of Maryland Coastline, I am including The New Geographies project.


To see complete images for Venice I and II, visit my website under Printing>New Geographies:
http://www.soledadsalame.com