Deborah Salt

By applying pigment to the sides of her works instead of to the surface that confronts the viewer—clearly, the sides of a canvas necessarily receive light at a steep oblique angle—Salt catalyzes a dynamic interaction between ambient light, the viewer’s perception, and the work itself, thereby annihilating any sense of a fixed image in favor of a dynamic of shifting relations. Here, light reflected from the sides of the paintings cast auras of color around them. Simultaneously these colors, in their very dimensional indistinctness, annihilate any rigid distinction between the space of the work itself and that of its environment, and impose a temporal dynamic on our experience of the work given the shifting conditions our perception presupposes.

Born in Los Angeles, Deborah Salt grew up in New York, where she studied at the Arts Students League and the School of Visual Arts. Formative influences include artists and thinkers of 1970 Soho including Brice Marden, Chuck Close, Jonathan Borofsky, Steve Reich, and Marcia Tucker. Salt moved to Los Angeles in 2003, where she continues to live and work today. She has exhibited since the mid-70s in New York, Los Angeles and internationally.