Shizu Saldamando, Sandra and Tammy, Hollywood Forever

0:00:05.4 Dr. Steven Zucker: We’re in the Hudson River Museum looking at, I can’t say a canvas, actually a block of wood by an artist named Shizu Saldamando. It’s titled Sandra and Tammy, Hollywood Forever. And it’s an incredibly compelling work, both in terms of its content but also just visually.

0:00:22.9 Dr. Karintha Lowe: We see Sandra and Tammy sitting on a lovely picnic blanket that is made out of a kind of origami-like paper called washi paper. And that is collaged on wood. And you can see the whirls of wood surrounding these two friends as they enjoy a movie at the cemetery, Hollywood Forever.

0:00:42.8 Dr. Steven Zucker: This artist’s body of work is completely embedded in L.A. culture. Hollywood Forever is a cemetery that’s used for public events, especially for outdoor movies. And so three friends—the artist, Sandra, and Tammy—have gone out to watch a movie, and actually, we know which one. They went to see Cry-Baby with Johnny Depp. And in the artist’s practice, what she does is she takes along a little digital camera, she takes photographs, and then she’ll take a selection of those photographs and make full-blown portraits. So her works are fascinating to me because this is portraiture, but this is not Grand Manner portraiture as we would expect in the 18th century.

0:01:24.4 Dr. Karintha Lowe: She takes these snapshot photographs of her friends and loved ones, a lot of party scenes of her own life in L.A., and then she takes details, and she really focuses and looks in on the figures, their postures, their facial expressions, their clothing, their hair. And she zooms in to give us a window into the personalities of the sitters of her portraits. And that’s also why this blank backdrop is an important choice, because she wants to foreground her subjects, to put in the front and center, for her viewers, the faces, figures, and personalities of her friends.

0:02:02.6 Dr. Steven Zucker: There is something really intimate, really loving about these images of her friends. There’s a sense of trust. They have given her permission to take the photograph and then to create these full-blown paintings. And she is inviting us in. And so there really is something that feels authentic. Look, for instance, at the skull worn on the pinky of one of the figures or that heart button. And then notice that Tammy’s bracelet is not actually depicted. This is a kind of costume jewelry that has been applied directly to the surface.

0:02:35.4 Dr. Karintha Lowe: If you look into the different media here, you have acrylic paint, but you also have glitter and metal leaf. And so these are all of these ways in which Saldamando is adding a three-dimensional element to her works that draw you in.

0:02:49.5 Dr. Steven Zucker: And even the lovely handling of the little sprigs of grass that help to anchor the figures in space are often made up of reflective Mylar-like material. They really catch the light. I love their jackets, the leather and the denim, and the fact that Tammy’s sleeves are rolled up so that you can make out not just tattoos, but very specific iconography in the tattoos on her forearms.

0:03:13.7 Dr. Karintha Lowe: Saldamando works in many different mediums. She runs a flourishing tattoo artist practice. And so we’re not sure if she did these tattoos herself, but there’s an honoring of that particular craft. Something that I always am drawn to when I look at this is the way that her figures are not looking at us. You can see Sandra looking away, perhaps watching a film, perhaps just gazing into the distance. And then Tammy gently is pushing her hair back and looking downwards. And so there’s a sense that we’re really capturing these figures at a moment in time, that they are kind of unaware.

0:03:47.5 Dr. Steven Zucker: The artist uses these remarkable, striking compositional strategies. The blanket sits perfectly in space, the figures are slightly off-center, and the entire composition both reads as these figures starkly isolated silhouette against this neutral ground. But at the same time, I begin to read a kind of recession. It’s almost as if they’re on a sand dune.

0:04:11.9 Dr. Karintha Lowe: I’m really thinking a lot about how she’s painting these figures onto the wood, and so it kind of sets them off immediately. You have the natural, organic background and then these vibrant, bright colors and folks who are dressed in punk rock clothing. But if you’ll notice, down on one of the figures, her feet, you can see that the wood encroaches onto the soles of her shoes. And so there’s this one instance in which the figure and the canvas come together.

0:04:41.2 Dr. Steven Zucker: And look at all the cultural signals. Tammy’s tattoos, the sparkling gold leggings that she’s wearing. I would be surprised if Sandra weren’t wearing Keds with her leather jacket and with that sparkling beer can. So there’s this kind of glitter, there’s this playfulness, and there’s all these references to culture in L.A. at a very particular moment in time.

0:05:04.8 Dr. Karintha Lowe: Saldamando talks a lot about how she grew up in the 1980s in the Mission area of San Francisco and grew up immersed in countercultural punk rock scene. And you can see that in a lot of the clothing and different jewelry that her figures are wearing.

0:05:21.7 Dr. Steven Zucker: And in an art historical sense, that is such a radical idea. When we think of portraiture, we think of portraiture in the Renaissance, in the Baroque era, in the 18th century, a kind of formality, a kind of attempt often to take the figure out of their own time. Here the artist is being absolutely authentic, placing their figures directly in their own time, even as she creates this ambiguous space in which they exist.

0:05:47.2 Dr. Karintha Lowe: Right. And it’s really important. When you look across all of her works, that Saldamando is portraying her friends, she’s portraying everyday people and everyday scenes. And for her, that is a way into this longer history of portraiture, which tends to be monumental, immediately politically important or historically important figures. Right? And who gets left out of that story? Saldamando’s works give us an answer.

This work at Art Bridges

The artist’s website

Karen Rapp, editor, When You Sleep: A Survey of Shizu Saldamando, exhibition catalogue (Los Angeles: Vincent Price Art Museum/East Los Angeles College, 2013).

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