Opening Reception: January 30, 5-7pm
On view: January 24 – February 25, 2024
Closing Event: February 27, 12-3pm
Sarah Lawrence College’s Gallery at Heimbold Visual Arts Center is pleased to announce that Gabriela Salazar’s solo exhibition Observed will be on display from January 24 to February 25, 2024. Salazar was the inaugural artist in the Gallery’s Workspace Residency Program in fall 2023, and her exhibition is made possible by a grant from the Mellon Foundation.
Responding to the overwhelming scale of the global climate crisis, Salazar’s work focuses on the beauty, fragility, and temporality of the present. The climate crisis “impacts your day-to-day life: your body, your family, your environment,” as Salazar writes, describing how she transforms seemingly banal or unremarkable items into a meditation on an ever-grasping relationship to permanence, care, and safety.
The works in Observed are part of a series Salazar calls “Leaves,” and were all made during her residency at Sarah Lawrence. Laying down prepared sheets of water-soluble paper over various items tied to her intimate world—leaves and branches, food scraps, her architect parents’ drawing stencils, rusty nails, screws, hinges and brackets, and her daughter’s building toys—Salazar then wets the paper until it returns to pulp. As the pulp redries, it becomes a cast of the field of matter, and absorbs the pigments of the plants and objects. These works shift in scale, between that which can be held in one’s hand, and the macro-and-microcosmic, as the applied pigments, residues of plant matter, gesture to other worlds.
For Observed, Salazar uses the windows and layout of her home as the embedded structure for these casts and their installation. In one wall-sized work titled “Leaves (One 365 (November, December)),” Salazar reflects on the 365 days of the year 2023, a sheet of letter–sized paper representing each day. The embedded stencils, hinges, and Duplo Legos remind us of the intergenerational transference of knowledge of our built environment, and the ways in which we access our relationship to its construction and endurance. Even arrested as they are in the “Leaves,” many of the pigments are not light-fast and will fade. Realizing this, we are reminded that even the most durable of objects and states are also in a constant, if invisible, flux. In looking, we are asked to move between different definitions of time, between time’s moment-to-moment unfolding in the now, and the impossibility of duration. What does it mean to observe, to care for, to revere, our ephemeral material world?
On February 27, 2024, in a process of creating and sharing time and attention, Salazar will break apart and distribute all of “Leaves (One 365 (November, December))” to the exhibitions’ final viewers and visitors. This action echoes her Climate Museum-commissioned work “Low Relief for High Water,” which was a water-soluble cast of the windows of her childhood home, broken apart and shared on October 10, 2021, in Washington Square Park, NYC.
About the Artist
Gabriela Salazar, born in New York City to architects from Puerto Rico, creates material-curious work about the ways in which humans gather meaning through their relationship with the structured and natural environments that surround them. Salazar has had solo exhibitions at NURTUREart, The Lighthouse Works, Efrain Lopez Gallery (Chicago), The River Valley Arts Collective, SLAG Gallery, and the Climate Museum (Washington Square Park, NYC). Her work has been included in group shows at the Whitney Museum, Socrates Sculpture Park, the Queens Museum, El Museo del Barrio, The Drawing Center, David Nolan Gallery, Someday Gallery, and at Storm King Art Center. Salazar’s work has also appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Hyperallergic, and The Brooklyn Rail. Residencies and grants include Workspace (LMCC), Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Abrons Arts Center, “Open Sessions” at The Drawing Center, the Socrates Fellowship, a City Artist Corps Grant, and a 2023 NYFA/NYSCA Fellowship in Craft/Sculpture. She holds an MFA from RISD, a BA from Yale University, and lives, works, and teaches in NYC.
Connected Exhibits
Salazar was the inaugural artist in the Gallery’s Workspace Residency Program in fall 2023. Salazar’s exhibition is the first of four in the Care and Climate Justice exhibition series funded by the Mellon Foundation.
Observed is one of three exhibitions that will take place at Sarah Lawrence College in winter and spring 2024; each exhibition is focused on the theme of Care and Climate Justice, and is co-curated by Sarah Hamill and Izzy Lockhart. The exhibitions are funded by a grant from the Mellon Foundation, which supports the Sarah Lawrence Interdisciplinary Collaborative on the Environment (SLICE), a collaboration to teach climate justice across the humanities at Sarah Lawrence and Bronx Community College. Against the urgency and presentism suggested by “climate crisis,” these exhibitions turn to responses that might be considered careful and slow, and that shed light on the long histories of environmental devastation on this continent shaped by settler colonialism and racial capitalism. As both an ethic and aesthetic, care takes the form of grief and remembrance, of attention and refusal, of adaptation and kinship, and of expansive imagination and storytelling in anticipation and prefiguration of other futures. In addition to Observed, the exhibitions include Shanequa Benitez, ‘But It’s Ours:’ The Redline between Poverty and Wealth (March 5 to April 12, 2024 at the Barbara Walters Campus Center Gallery and the Center for Urban River at Beczak), co-sponsored by Groundwork Hudson Valley, and Groundings: Care and Climate Justice, a group show with Emily Johnson, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Courtney Desiree Morris, and Sarah Rosalena (March 26 to May 12, 2024 at the Gallery at Heimbold). A fourth exhibition curated by Patricia Cazorla will take the form of an experiential installation titled Perennial Land by Laia Cabrera & Isabelle Duverger, which will take place at Hall of Fame Art Gallery at Bronx Community College from March 21 to May 16, 2024.
A catalog will accompany the three exhibitions with artist interviews by Sarah Lawrence students, an introduction by Sarah Hamill and Izzy Lockhart, and essays by Sumita Chakraborty, K. Melchor Hall, Karintha Lowe, Emily Roehl, Camille Georgeson-Usher, and Kate Zambreno.
More information about the Care and Climate Justice series of exhibitions can be found here: https://careandclimatejustice.org/