Alex Dolores Salerno

Artist Statement

My interdisciplinary practice is informed by “queer-crip” community, and the radical shifts necessary to center interdependence and nurture connections to the earth. Spanning sculpture, installation, video and photography, the work critiques standards of productivity, and the commodification of our lives. My primary materials include used or found objects alongside slow pacing, sensory exploration, collaboration and accessibility practices. I approach access expansively and playfully using visual description, captioning, and translation, as well as the invitation to touch, stim, and identify with nature. Additionally, I draw from sites of inaccessibility and barriers to care in order to recognize our needs which are often suppressed to conform to white supremacist ideals of professionalism, perfectionism, and individualism. Utilizing materials such as coffee, burl wood or bedding, I fuse constructed boundaries of nature, the workplace, and a diasporic sense of home to evoke the incompatibility of our "bodyminds" and 24/7 society. These tensions ask us to embrace slowness, and confront the colonial capitalist forces that lead to overconsumption, particularly of the United States on occupied Turtle Island and its global consequences. To assert the urgency of rest, on a personal, societal, and ecological level is to protect the sacred and resource ourselves for the world that we build together. Through multi-media and multi-sensory strategies, I work to detangle need from shame and isolation with the aim of making space for the practice of love.