Excerpted from:

The Brooklyn Rail

James Kalm
April, 2005

“Luminous Layers”, a light installation by Carol Salmanson, is an elegant environment that completely transforms the gallery space, recalling not only the sets of early Star Trek episodes but also the disco lighting of the late 1970s. Backlit panels of PVC, intricately angled into niches and alcoves, are the structural space into which Salmanson’s light sculptures are placed. The lighting elements are simple, narrow stainless-steel boxes attached just above eye level. Struts of red-, orange-, or blue-colored diodes descend on plastic bars like the frets on a guitar neck. This illuminated space carries Dan Flavin’s ideas of light as colored volume to a new conclusion, and the architectural setting invites observers to bathe themselves in the ambient hues.