No Shoulder
2024
While you were away, the road flooded., 2024 Graphite on paper
Tendons and synapses, open to air., 2024 Graphite on paper
Holding water, a head and shoulders., 2024 Graphite on paper
Cracks and shapes, a familiar route., 2024
Oil charcoal on paper
Counting rings, chicks in the house., 2024
Graphite on paper
Two mothers, filing nails., 2024 Graphite on paper
The sinkhole, Dinosaur Playground., 2024
Graphite on paper
Roots rending, an old foundation., 2024
Oil charcoal on paper
A tender catastrophe, only in sleep., 2024
Graphite on paper
Compendium (1), 2024
Steel, aluminum, found steel plumb bob
2024
While you were away, the road flooded., 2024 Graphite on paper
Tendons and synapses, open to air., 2024 Graphite on paper
Holding water, a head and shoulders., 2024 Graphite on paper
Cracks and shapes, a familiar route., 2024
Oil charcoal on paper
Counting rings, chicks in the house., 2024
Graphite on paper
Two mothers, filing nails., 2024 Graphite on paper
The sinkhole, Dinosaur Playground., 2024
Graphite on paper
Roots rending, an old foundation., 2024
Oil charcoal on paper
A tender catastrophe, only in sleep., 2024
Graphite on paper
Compendium (1), 2024
Steel, aluminum, found steel plumb bob
Efraín López, New York City
Working across sculpture, installation, and drawing, Gabriela Salazar has developed a rich cross-media practice, which often addresses the tenuous balance between our natural and built environments. The daughter of Puerto Rican architects, Salazar continuously explores themes of building and rebuilding, whether in response to natural disasters or the passage of time, by isolating moments that speak ambiguously to both repair and disrepair. Her earlier work has featured receptive collaborations with nature as well as architecture. For a 2021 site-specific drawing, Holding Pattern, Walls (for Mara), produced at the Al Held Foundation, the artist rubbed powdered graphite directly onto the studio walls in a geometric composition which revealed the cracks and patches left behind by former studio residents along with the ad hoc arrangement of wood planks on its reverse. In her Leaves series (2023-ongoing), Salazar uses water-soluble paper to cast various household objects and matter–the resulting ghostly forms infused with traces of color leached from autumn leaves, kitchen scraps, coffee grounds, and other incidental media.
In this new body of work, Salazar has produced drawings in graphite and charcoal, all of which are based on photographs she shot earlier this year. The source material, culled from the collection of iimages on her iPhone and sometimes paired in diptychs, expose Salazar’s careful attention to her surroundings. Across the series, an attunement to interconnectedness rhymes rows of wrapped cables with the knotty roots of trees, or the spidery cracks in a sidewalk with the network of wrinkles across a multi-generational set of hands. An image of a collapsed billboard in San Juan, for instance, is directly juxtaposed with an intimate picture of the artist’s sleeping daughter. These opposing motifs—exterior/interior, neglect/care—are harmoniously connected through formal means as the linear thrust of the scaffold crosses the sheet’s edge and merges into the young subject’s collar. While explaining her process, Salazar has described it as a conversation with the source photograph, requiring problem-solving and experimentation to arrive at each drawn reproduction. In order to recreate the wood grain of a tree stump that had been abruptly chopped down near her home, she used the technique of debossing for its concentric rings. Observed closely, the recessed marks resemble script as if embedded with an inscrutable message.
Considering the snapshot quality of her subjects, whether a road that has suddenly flooded or a sinkhole that appeared overnight, Salazar’s time-intensive and laborious process might seem counterintuitive. Recalling previous projects, which centered on a daily drawing practice, here she has invested hours of close observation and illusionistic skill in order to translate each fleeting moment into a sensitively-rendered drawing. By distilling the visual effects of overwhelming and uncontrollable forces–weather, gravity, age–into the foundational elements of line, form, and value, Salazar’s grayscale reconstructions become a way of slowing time. Taken together, through its repeated motifs of knots and fissures, the work reenacts not only interconnection, but entanglement, encouraging us to look just as intently—if not for meaning, then for a direct confrontation with the precarity of everyday experience.
Working across sculpture, installation, and drawing, Gabriela Salazar has developed a rich cross-media practice, which often addresses the tenuous balance between our natural and built environments. The daughter of Puerto Rican architects, Salazar continuously explores themes of building and rebuilding, whether in response to natural disasters or the passage of time, by isolating moments that speak ambiguously to both repair and disrepair. Her earlier work has featured receptive collaborations with nature as well as architecture. For a 2021 site-specific drawing, Holding Pattern, Walls (for Mara), produced at the Al Held Foundation, the artist rubbed powdered graphite directly onto the studio walls in a geometric composition which revealed the cracks and patches left behind by former studio residents along with the ad hoc arrangement of wood planks on its reverse. In her Leaves series (2023-ongoing), Salazar uses water-soluble paper to cast various household objects and matter–the resulting ghostly forms infused with traces of color leached from autumn leaves, kitchen scraps, coffee grounds, and other incidental media.
In this new body of work, Salazar has produced drawings in graphite and charcoal, all of which are based on photographs she shot earlier this year. The source material, culled from the collection of iimages on her iPhone and sometimes paired in diptychs, expose Salazar’s careful attention to her surroundings. Across the series, an attunement to interconnectedness rhymes rows of wrapped cables with the knotty roots of trees, or the spidery cracks in a sidewalk with the network of wrinkles across a multi-generational set of hands. An image of a collapsed billboard in San Juan, for instance, is directly juxtaposed with an intimate picture of the artist’s sleeping daughter. These opposing motifs—exterior/interior, neglect/care—are harmoniously connected through formal means as the linear thrust of the scaffold crosses the sheet’s edge and merges into the young subject’s collar. While explaining her process, Salazar has described it as a conversation with the source photograph, requiring problem-solving and experimentation to arrive at each drawn reproduction. In order to recreate the wood grain of a tree stump that had been abruptly chopped down near her home, she used the technique of debossing for its concentric rings. Observed closely, the recessed marks resemble script as if embedded with an inscrutable message.
Considering the snapshot quality of her subjects, whether a road that has suddenly flooded or a sinkhole that appeared overnight, Salazar’s time-intensive and laborious process might seem counterintuitive. Recalling previous projects, which centered on a daily drawing practice, here she has invested hours of close observation and illusionistic skill in order to translate each fleeting moment into a sensitively-rendered drawing. By distilling the visual effects of overwhelming and uncontrollable forces–weather, gravity, age–into the foundational elements of line, form, and value, Salazar’s grayscale reconstructions become a way of slowing time. Taken together, through its repeated motifs of knots and fissures, the work reenacts not only interconnection, but entanglement, encouraging us to look just as intently—if not for meaning, then for a direct confrontation with the precarity of everyday experience.
— Ana Torok, 2024