Nicole A. Salazar '06-07

The Office of the Arts’s Council Prize for the Visual Arts “recognizes outstanding work by a Harvard undergraduate in the field of visual arts, which includes but is not limited to painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, film, and video.” Nicole A. Salazar ’06-’07, this year’s winner, certainly qualifies. Working in painting, drawing, and animation, she possesses not only depth but also great breadth in her artistic powers.

“There are some people who are doing film all the way through or painting all the way through. It was important to me to get at what I was trying to do from every different angle,” Salazar says.

Her passion for the arts began early on, when she took a photography class in fifth grade.

“I got really into it,” Salazar says. “I built a black room in my basement. I was really interested in the formal aspects of it.”

Salazar thought her involvement in photography and the arts was over when she chose to go to Harvard instead of art school. But, as it turned out, her artistic life was just about to take off. Salazar decided that she wanted to explore new modes of expression.

“By the time I got to college I didn’t know what I wanted photography for. But I had my time with it. I took a color class and then left it. I thought I’d be more interested in animation—best way to combine everything,” Salazar says.

Her animated film, “Pidge,” received three nominations at the 2005 SunDeis Film Festival, held at Brandeis University. She won the award for Best Sound. She was also selected to be a student representative for the committee of the 2006 Ivy Film Festival.

Salazar credits “Pidge” for truly stimulating her interest in animation, especially editing and sound. “I had done a video before that, but that animation showed me that there was a whole life of things to do in animation, because it’s such an endless thing to pursue,” Salazar says of the short.

Although who Pidge is, or what exactly Pidge means, is unclear, the images and accompanying sounds linger even after the film ends. The hooting of an owl and the rush of wind that make up the background noise give it an eerie quality.

Much of Salazar’s art has this same eeriness.

“I am interested in the relationship between power and awareness, or lack of awareness, in the context of violence, and the sensation of living in a sort of fog state where the elements that control one’s environment are not immediately visible,” Salazar says.

This interest in power relations stems from her meditations on politics, she says. She is currently pursuing her political interests while she works for the independent news program Democracy Now! and conducts research for a book about wealth. This interest in politics is not distinct from her art.

“The thrust of the things I put my energies into are organizing more politically motivated things,” she says. “I studied Arabic, took human rights classes and religion classes, and so there was where most of my focus was. So politics is important me, something I think about a lot, but it is in my art a lot.”

Her painted work eschews traditional perspective and techniques. As Salazar explains, “I think of myself primarily as a drawer, not a painter. In terms of the subject matter and what I’m thinking about, classical ideas of perspective are not really important, besides the point. I think about it more in terms of multiples, quantities, and patterns. Having rectilinear three-dimensional shapes wouldn’t help [and] has no place.”

Though her thesis was in painting, utilizing a technique she developed with acrylic and ink on wood panels, Salazar is still involved with many other mediums, including non-fiction film and animation. Currently, she is in the midst of working on an animated film funded by an Office of the Arts grant, entitled “The Last Days of Becoming.” It tells the story of a boy and his life in real and imaginary worlds.

In pursuing art as seriously as she has, Salazar recognizes that it is an unceasing quest for inspiration.

“It’s a sort of a constant search,” she says. “Sometimes you feel really out of touch with art and then you see something and you feel inspired and excited, and there are lots of possibilities for your art.”