Soledad Salamé’s interventions in the front pages of newspapers reverse the notion of yesterday’s news as throwaway material. After 9/11, Salamé began working with newspaper archives from her local library, pulling back editions of The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, USA Today and Chile Today. The repetition of traumatic images on their front pages create typologies of climate change, terrorism, the migrant crisis, the drug war and drought. Intermixing English and Spanish headlines from the course of several years, makes the reality of our border relationship with Latin America all the more palpable.
Salamé scanned each front page and prints it digitally. She added hand coloring and intricate embroidery to portions of the front page, carefully stitching over a piece of clothing, landscape or headline with thread, recalling the process of repetitive mark making in drawing. These dense fields of thread appear sculptural. There is an optical shift in the surface as the paper transforms into a textile. Salamé takes this process a step further in etched glass works that use front pages as source material for works that mimic a folded newspaper. Installed over a metal rod jutting out from the wall, each folded glasswork contains a laser engraved and sandblasted surface. Light directed onto the “front page” projects its shadow onto the wall behind it. These works act as afterimages indelible in the mind.
-LB
