Metro Art Access NYC

Doris Salcedo’s A Flor de Piel undulated across the floor, evoking conflicting feelings of awe and dissonance. A room-sized shroud composed entirely of preserved rose petals (a process that effectively renders them halfway between dead and alive) and then sutured together by hand, A Flor de Piel served as a funerary offering to a Columbian nurse who was kidnapped and tortured to death. The literal translation for the Spanish idiom a flor de piel is “the flower of ones’ skin” – the softest part of the body, the most sensitive. The closest we can come to it in English is the phrase “to wear one’s heart on one’s sleeve.”

Salcedo’s work focuses in on the injustices and suffering of modern day life – ones rooted in colonialism and racism. Her work pokes fingers at the cracks that we wish had stayed hidden, at the trauma left behind by unexplained absences. As someone who emigrated from the Philippines at a young age, I’ve often wondered if it is possible to make work that appropriately highlights and illustrates these kinds of experiences. Seeing Salcedo’s work in person has convinced me of that.

I went into Sarah Charlesworth’s exhibition at the New Museum with no prior knowledge of her work and wasn’t expecting the strong, almost visceral, reactions that her images elicited. The exhibit, titled Doubleworld, encompassed a significant survey of her works – the first in New York to date – and encompassed her 40 year career.

Charlesworth was an American conceptual photographer, most known for pioneering the use of appropriated images and her involvement in the Pictures Generation, a group of artists in New York who were fascinated by how images shaped our consumer and media saturated society.

“Stills” – perhaps the most moving series of the exhibition – was featured in the main room, and is the first thing encountered upon stepping out of the elevator. Charlesworth rephotographed press images of people falling or jumping from buildings, magnified, cropped and made into large-scale works. The appropriated nature of the images is apparent from the graininess of the resulting work: at 6 feet or taller, the photographs become abstractions. But, at the heart of each image was a human form, made life-size, forcing the viewers to reconcile their own conflicting feelings of trauma, sensationalism and beauty in our image-heavy world. While considering these images, I felt almost inexplicable relief at the capture of this “moment before”; with no closure and no resolution, these figures remain suspended – still – in mid-air ad infinitum.

The rest of her work didn’t disappoint – “Modern History” and “Renaissance Painting” which was in keeping with her explorations in appropriation, and her stunning “Objects of Desire” series. Mined from sources such as magazines and textbooks, the images are cut out and set against bright, pulsating color fields. The images were then placed against each other in diptychs and triptychs, sometimes even stacked upon one another. This series succeeded on many levels: colorful and bright enough to stop viewers in their tracks and then meaningful and humorous enough to keep them engaged.

Experiencing this exhibition of Charleworth’s work affected me in two tangible ways. First, seeing how “Objects of Desire” was printed (cibachrome) and framed (lacquered wood that matched the color field of the photograph) served as inspiration for how to install a group of images in the fall. Second, seeing what is possible through the mining of images and the study of photography was inspiration to continue honing and studying my craft.