Washington City Paper Art Review by Louis Jacobson

The recent arc of Sarah Hood Salomon’s art began with ethereal photographs of trees, then morphed into the interaction between mutually encroaching swaths of nature and the human-built environment. Her current exhibit at Multiple Exposures Gallery allows man-made structures to replace flora entirely, as Salomon destroys some of the nature photographs she’s made to use them as fodder for resin-encased sculptures. If you look closely at the traces of Salomon’s “purposefully scratched, cut and puréed” photographs, you might make out a shading of light or dark here and there. Mostly, though, you’ll see linguine-shaped strips arranged into organic forms that suggest curled hairs, hanging moss, feathers, and brushy plant matter. Some of Salomon’s more intriguing works use thin, parallel cross sections of photographic remnants suspended within clear, hardened cubes, as if they were prepared microscopic slides. Even more compelling are Salomon’s experiments with “sanded” detritus from photographs, with dust either encased in clear, snow globe-like spheres or piled up in empty lucite boxes like a miniature experiment in land art. Artistically, it’s not clear that the sculptural transformations are more remarkable than Salomon’s original photographs were on their own. (I chose her tree photography as the second-best photography exhibit in D.C. of 2019.) But the process of altering her images is undeniably poignant. As Salomon writes in her artist’s statement, the trees she photographed were about to be uprooted for development, and by sending her images through the blender, she makes sure that they “can’t be reconstructed, just as landscapes altered by humans can’t be reassembled.”

Sarah Hood Salomon’s Questioning the Photograph runs through June 30 at Multiple Exposures Gallery, 105 N. Union St., Alexandria. Daily, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. multipleexposuresgallery.com.