Liv Mette Larsen and Carol Salmanson, Williamsburg Location

Urban Juxtapositions

November 20, 2015 to January 10, 2016
Opening reception November 20, 2015, 6pm to 8pm

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Slag Contemporary is pleased to present Urban Juxtapositions, a two-person exhibition of works by Brooklyn-based artists Liv Mette Larsen and Carol Salmanson. The first collaborative show between the two artists with Slag Contemporary, Urban Juxtapositions is comprised of works whose subjects touch on themes of memory, fragmentation, or story through form, color, light, and a spatial dialogue between these matters. Through particular techniques of abstractions, monochrome, or light technology, the works act as hieroglyphs for the everyday.

Liv Mette Larsen (Norway) holds an MFA from Hochschule der Künste (UdK) Berlin, Germany. In a career spanning more than thirty years, Larsen’s intuitive paintings, watercolors and drawings establish an energetic dialogue about perception and the transitory moments of life. Working primarily in monochrome silhouettes, she employs alternating scales to reconstruct the subjective realities of her narratives. In her statement, Larsen addresses her relationship with life and abstraction, writing, “...My work consists of impressions, cut-outs of everyday life, neutralized, reduced, abstracted…I work out a balance between figuration and abstraction, but never quite leave the reality existing around me.” She proposes an inductive perspective, abstracting people and things from her daily encounters that reflect the circumstances of her practice. Her paintings dissolve the boundaries between figuration and abstraction, with objects transforming fluidly into organic geometric forms. She paints with densely applied egg tempera to create the illusion of volume and to allow isolated elements to become vivid archetypal forms and graphic signs. 
Carol Salmanson (USA) works with light technology, optics, and reflective material to create installation and site-specific or pictorial planes. With an M.B.A. and background in biological psychology, Salmanson began painting post-graduate school at the Arts Student League, SVA, and the National Academy of Fine Art. This unorthodox and rich background lends her work with both an underlying technological format and a classical understanding of color theory and line. Her “light-paintings” are intuitive pieces that use the technology of LEDs as paint or tool, and modern reflective or transparent material as canvas or surface. Each created piece implies memory, as the eye is caught in the movement between surfaces and reflected light. Through viewing these reflected bits of light against surface, viewers viscerally reignite memory and then sustain the qualities or tone of the experience, giving it form and bringing it to life in the present. In her statement, Salmanson states “…The space I create is artificial but not fictional: a stage set, lit from without and within.”