Great Hall Exhibition Series Spring 2025

List of Works

1. “I wish you could have seen them” (Part 5), 2024

Photogram of decommissioned NYC traffic light lenses, 40” L x 30” H x 3” D; freestanding steel armature, 45” L x 40” H x 6” D

Red, yellow, and blue spheres illuminate an encompassing black background: To create these colorful abstractions, Salane used decommissioned traffic light lenses acquired at a local municipal auction following New York City’s transition to LED lighting in 2001. The photogram is the result of a cameraless process—the lenses are placed on light-sensitive paper and briefly exposed. Their constellation of semi-transparent shapes, all with soft boundaries, suggests blurred vision at night. Welcoming audiences in the Duke House foyer, the work greets the viewer at the exhibition’s threshold, both conjuring the lenses’ past role in junctions of organized movement and presaging the show’s themes of visibility, movement, and infrastructural memory.

2. Intersection; a grid in points (continued), 2025

Freestanding decommissioned traffic light lenses on steel armatures and hanging traffic light lenses on fasteners, dimensions variable

This newly commissioned installation in the Marica Vilcek Great Hall builds on Salane’s longstanding engagement with the collection of light lenses also on view in the Duke House foyer. Here, the lenses are elevated through a diverse range of steel supports that recall, but also depart from, their past metropolitan use, vividly summoning the constellation of bright colors in traffic. Contrasting markedly industrial materials with the historic grandeur of the Duke House’s Beaux-Arts architecture, the multipart installation materializes what Salane dubs an “energy shift,” highlighting the lenses’ relationship to transitional moments of technological advancement—and concomitant obsolescence—in the urban environment.

3. Dragon’s Blood, Cochineal, Maya Blue, 2025

Three inkjet prints in walnut frame, 42” L x 34” H x 1.5” D

4. Red Earth: Jamaica, Pink Earth: Japan, Pompeii Blue, 2025

Three inkjet prints in walnut frame, 42” L x 34” H x 1.5” D

These photographic assemblages depict select materials from the Forbes Pigment Collection, housed across the street at the Institute of Fine Arts’ Conservation Center. The works draw on Salane’s extensive research into the collection and her yearlong collaboration with the Conservation Center community. The pigments reveal aspects of a centuries-old globally connected world; they are artifacts of trade, colonialism, and even biology, as some are sourced from animals and plants. In each work, three images are arrayed to highlight a missing fourth piece of the grid. Poignantly installed in the Lecture Hall, the academic heart of the Institute, the empty spaces recall the lacunae that still surround scholars’ understandings of these materials: their past uses, cultural meanings, and provenance often remain shrouded in mystery.

5. Persian Bowl with Rubens’ Adoration, 2025

UV prints of x-ray scans on decommissioned lightboxes, 16” L x 18.5” H x 2” D; steel armature, 44” L x 92” H x 16” D

6. Conservation Reports, 2025

Screen print on archival paper, 35” L x 40” H x 1.5” D; steel armature, 52” L x 92” H x 16” D

Situated across from one another in the Loeb Room, these works share a space with books written by Institute of Fine Arts alumni. Salane revives the room as a center of learning: In the building’s past life as a private residence, this room was the library. Two steel supports evoke the functional armatures of art storage facilities. One hosts a collage of notes from past conservation reports, extracted from their original object of study. The other supports the display of two light boxes previously used to examine technical x-rays, today outmoded, and which the artist discovered in the Institute’s storage. Salane reactives the now-antiquated light boxes with new UV prints translated from material studies of a bowl from Persia and Adoration of the Magi by Peter Paul Rubens.