Nancy Saleme
Cazorla & Saleme 10 years of collaborations
As collaborative artists, our vision is to capture the essence of human nature and express the struggle of society to improve living conditions. For the latest projects, please visit www.CazorlaandSaleme.com
Selected artworks for the Second Annual Art Competition, The Hammond Museum, Japanese Stroll Garden, North Salem, NY
Selected artworks for the Second Annual Art Competition, The Hammond Museum, Japanese Stroll Garden, North Salem, NY
The Garden of Opportunities, 2012
Every beautiful tomato we look at in the supermarket, and almost every fruit and vegetable we eat is picked by a human hand. Even in the most sophisticated first world country, machinery has not been able to replace the oldest job on earth: harvesting.
Unfortunately, many migrant* farmworkers are children. To help their parents, they begin this hard labor as early as 5 years of age. The majority of pickers are undocumented immigrants from Mexico or other Latin-American countries. Usually, they leave their homeland in search for security and better living. The developed corporate food industry has made harvesting a job that is done in very precarious conditions, among them—working in dangerously high heat, exposure to pesticides, and long work hours without overtime pay.
Mixed media, 6 x 12 feet
Mixed media, 6 x 12 feet
DeFence, 2010
is a collection of portraits of farmworkers and people of all ages including the elderly and young children. The portraits are rendered in charcoal pencil and charcoal powder in a painterly manner on bare wood panels. The charcoal and the wood symbolize humanity. The portraits are surrounded by giant imaginary flower patterns, painted in vivid colors using acrylics and markers. They give a unique interpretation of fantasy farmland. The juxtaposition of the portraits’ grayscale and the colorful artificial landscape tells the story of the typical immigrant tale: The American dream that turns all too frequently into a harsh reality with only a few traces of the anticipated candy land dream.
Sketches of Ideas
With this particular series of artwork, we began by collecting written and visual information from the Internet, newspapers and news broadcasts. This process took us about two months. This led us to a series of meetings and discussions. Next, we started shaping digital sketches from selected photographs found throughout our research with the aim of conveying the concept and our visual interpretation.
The last stage of this process was to transfer the final digital sketch into a surface. Here is where art begins to take space and the people that were once captured in news reports and lost between piles of information become alive.