Endnotes¹


Sarah Saltzman
  • *
    •

    Artwork

    1
    2
    3
    4
    5
    6



    Statement The city is Los Angeles. The year is 2004. It’s a warm fall day, like most fall days in LA. You get home from Kindergarten and kick off your light-up Sketchers, then find a sheet of scrap paper. Soon, it will be filled with adventures of Gnocchi the Super Rabbit, the latest creation of your five-year-old mind. But for now, the page is blank, and it holds the endless potential to bring to life all of your zany characters and silly stories. It’s going to be a good day. 18 years later, not much has changed: the core of my artistic practice remains rooted in both the art of storytelling and the act of manifesting my own mind on the page. My work often centers on things that scare me, the parts of myself and the world that I have difficulty talking – or even thinking – about, perpetually seeking to translate the unspeakable into the understandable. It also tends to take the form of “low” arts – comics, animation, video games – narrative entertainment grounded in communication with the audience. My art looks inward, but it also seeks to find the universality in those feelings or thoughts or memories, to share them in a way that makes sense to me and to the viewer. I make art because I don’t know how to understand myself without it. The city is New Haven. The year is 2022. It’s a chilly spring day, like a lot of spring days in New Haven. You try to find a way to explain who you are and what you do, and maybe you succeed. You’ve come a long way since Gnocchi, but you still delight in the blank page. You still delight in the endless possibility of your own mind, in the power of creation and of sharing those creations with the world.

    Student

    gallery, people, printing, bit, display, design, wall, semester, drawing, posters, space, layout, corner, suggested, sketches, various versions, project, grappling, issues, shelf
    “I have been kind of redesigning a lot of the pages to have a little bit more of a digital version that reflects...the way that my hand drawn pieces look…there's a little bit more of a sketchy quality, but it is more reflective of my style.”
    “I think we're having this sort of book/zine fair out front. But what in the gallery? Is it something that you can pick up and leaf through? Will people just take stuff? If it's something you can pick up? And does it make sense to have it just as, like, graphic design installations where people just take copies of things, and that's the nature of the installation? So those are just kind of all thoughts about the final version of it that I'm still grappling with.”
    “In terms of the 'why' this particular medium, one of the things with the design concentration that I feel like I miss is it's all very kind of technical, like it's all very design focused...it's all like InDesign, Photoshop, layouts, texts or things, and I 1) miss drawing and wanted to incorporate some of that, and 2) also just felt like for my final project, I wanted it to be the material that I was working with and designing with. I wanted it all to have come for me and not be laying out someone else's text or images.”
    “In terms of the actual story content, the premise is kids on bikes in a small town solving mysteries, this kind of adventure about a boy who died as a child, but was fine and can see ghosts. And it's a kind of cartoony, comic-like premise.”
    “But also, the idea came a little bit from my own experience growing up chronically ill and being isolated at home a lot, which I think was something that, in the past few years, a lot of people have been dealing with. And that sense of isolation and separation from people was something I was interested in exploring. And I like the way that comics historically use kind of silly things of, like, superheroes and capes and tights to often deal with heavier weightier issues. So I kind of wanted to marry those two things a little bit.”
    Endnotes¹

    Sarah Saltzman
  • *
    •

    Artwork

  • 1
    •
  • 2
    •
  • 3
    •
  • 4
    •
  • 5
    •
  • 6
    •



    Statement The city is Los Angeles. The year is 2004. It’s a warm fall day, like most fall days in LA. You get home from Kindergarten and kick off your light-up Sketchers, then find a sheet of scrap paper. Soon, it will be filled with adventures of Gnocchi the Super Rabbit, the latest creation of your five-year-old mind. But for now, the page is blank, and it holds the endless potential to bring to life all of your zany characters and silly stories. It’s going to be a good day. 18 years later, not much has changed: the core of my artistic practice remains rooted in both the art of storytelling and the act of manifesting my own mind on the page. My work often centers on things that scare me, the parts of myself and the world that I have difficulty talking – or even thinking – about, perpetually seeking to translate the unspeakable into the understandable. It also tends to take the form of “low” arts – comics, animation, video games – narrative entertainment grounded in communication with the audience. My art looks inward, but it also seeks to find the universality in those feelings or thoughts or memories, to share them in a way that makes sense to me and to the viewer. I make art because I don’t know how to understand myself without it. The city is New Haven. The year is 2022. It’s a chilly spring day, like a lot of spring days in New Haven. You try to find a way to explain who you are and what you do, and maybe you succeed. You’ve come a long way since Gnocchi, but you still delight in the blank page. You still delight in the endless possibility of your own mind, in the power of creation and of sharing those creations with the world.

    Student