© 2013 ch-arts
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Linda Salerno, “The Black Mirror Series”
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exhibition
LINDA SALERNO - "Who are You?"
For this first solo Exhibition in Switzerland, Linda Salerno presents under the title "Who are You?" a selection of "The Black Mirror Series", a new body of work.
Linda Salerno was born in 1950 in York, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Calabrian parents who immigrated to the US. After her graduation with a BFA from Moore College of Art in 1972, she moved to live and work in New York City, where she was one of the pioneering artists who settled into SoHo.
For almost 30 years she lived and worked in SoHo. These experiences influenced her as an artist. She is known amongst her network of friends and colleagues in all creative sectors as a passionate painter. Most of her exhibitions took place in the US; showing in New York City, Florida, Chicago and California, as well as other cities throughout the US. After Flavio Caroli became aware of her work through Corrado Levy’s exhibition "New York New" in Milano in 1983, she was invited to show paintings in 1984, as part of an international survey exhibition titled "Anni Ottanta". This exhibition was presented simultaneously in Rimini, Bologna and Ravenna, Italy.
In 2002, Linda Salerno for personal health reasons, made a radical move from SoHo in Manhattan to Someo in the Vallemaggia. She had been visiting this area of the Ticino since 1996 with her husband Martin Kunz, an art-historian and curator, enjoying the wild nature and using it’s elements immediately in her nature related works. This radical change of environment had a profound impact on her art. Since her arrival permanantly in the Ticino, she has developed three large groups of work, some of which were immediately exhibited in Chicago and New York. In 2007, a small selection of the second group of work, titled, "Le Moniteur de la Mode" was shown in the group show "Woman Only" at Anita Amman Gallery in Locarno. These are the only works of Linda Salerno’s to date that have been exhibited in the Ticino, until this current exhibition, "Who are You?" - works from "The Black Mirror Series".
"Who are You?" - works from "The Black Mirror Series"
In the artist’s statement (enclosed), she hints at much of the process of these works. Though she hints at it, the artist does not explain how the works have been created. This is especially interesting because these works have not been digitally manipulated. In this series the artist integrated elements of painting, performance, nature, her own figure, dance and fashion. Over the last few years the artist, Linda Salerno, has gathered materials, while producing photographs, drawings and paintings for each of these works. All of the aspects of the artist’s process are combined, arriving at a series of images and body of work that integrate time, movement as well as natural and personal content. Each layer of the individual media combined in one image present a still-photograph that synthesizes somehow the complexity of a "Gesamtkunstwerk".
The last caption of her statement provides a clue to the answer of the question asked by this series:
"My interest in fashion comes from my Italian heritage. My mother was a seamstress and my grandmother was the weaver of her village. My mother remembers having silkworms and making silk. For me they were only stories told by my grandmother and mother about immigrating to the states when my mother was only 13 years old. She is now 95. Immigration creates images that have little to do with reality but can form deep visual images that come both from the stories and from the imagination".
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