Whether Shape or Break
2024
Photography by Brian Galderisi.
2024
Photography by Brian Galderisi.
The Korn Gallery
Drew University, NJ
Drew University, NJ
Reclamation (and Place, Puerto Rico)
2022
Wood, burlap, steel, asphalt, structural foam, coffee clay (used coffee grounds, flour, salt).
Photograpy by Sebastian Bach.
2022
Wood, burlap, steel, asphalt, structural foam, coffee clay (used coffee grounds, flour, salt).
Photograpy by Sebastian Bach.
no existe un mundo poshuracan:
Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria
Whitney Museum of American Art, NY
Organized by Marcela Guerrero.
Made specifically for the exhibition, "no existe un mundo poshuracán," this work takes the tools of my process for reclaiming used coffee grounds for an air dry clay—a process that includes drying, mixing, and forming—and reimagines them into a material landscape.
Historically, coffee is one of the Puerto Rican archipelago’s most significant crops, and was once cultivated by my grandparents. (My paternal grandparents, Joaquín and Toñita had a coffee farm near Ciales from the '50s - '70s; my paternal grandfather, Clery, was a horticulture professor in Mayagüez.)
The work suggests that reclaiming Puerto Rico’s agricultural independence in the name of past generations as well as those to come is a basic demand at the center of any rebuilding project for Puerto Rico. This autonomy is necessary to create food security, ecological sustainability, and climate resilience in Puerto Rico.
Reclamation—reclamación in Spanish—takes on layers of meaning that it lacks in English, to include a sense of demand or complaint. The work links this demand to both local and diasporic contexts, referencing elements of both Puerto Rican and New York infrastructure through its resemblances to the stilts of houses in the impoverished community of El Fanguito in San Juan, to mangrove roots, to the skyline, and to the hard but ever-shifting groundscape of New York City, where I was born.
Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria
Whitney Museum of American Art, NY
Organized by Marcela Guerrero.
Made specifically for the exhibition, "no existe un mundo poshuracán," this work takes the tools of my process for reclaiming used coffee grounds for an air dry clay—a process that includes drying, mixing, and forming—and reimagines them into a material landscape.
Historically, coffee is one of the Puerto Rican archipelago’s most significant crops, and was once cultivated by my grandparents. (My paternal grandparents, Joaquín and Toñita had a coffee farm near Ciales from the '50s - '70s; my paternal grandfather, Clery, was a horticulture professor in Mayagüez.)
The work suggests that reclaiming Puerto Rico’s agricultural independence in the name of past generations as well as those to come is a basic demand at the center of any rebuilding project for Puerto Rico. This autonomy is necessary to create food security, ecological sustainability, and climate resilience in Puerto Rico.
Reclamation—reclamación in Spanish—takes on layers of meaning that it lacks in English, to include a sense of demand or complaint. The work links this demand to both local and diasporic contexts, referencing elements of both Puerto Rican and New York infrastructure through its resemblances to the stilts of houses in the impoverished community of El Fanguito in San Juan, to mangrove roots, to the skyline, and to the hard but ever-shifting groundscape of New York City, where I was born.
— 2022
Low Relief for High Water
2021
Water-soluble paper, methyl cellulose, sandbags.
Photography by Sari Goodfriend and Nicole Salazar.
2021
Water-soluble paper, methyl cellulose, sandbags.
Photography by Sari Goodfriend and Nicole Salazar.
The Climate Museum
Presented in Washington Square Park, NYC
LOW RELIEF FOR HIGH WATER
is made of water-soluble paper
and methyl-cellulose,
a water-based non-toxic adhesive.
is cast from the windows of my childhood home,
an apartment in which I currently live, again,
on Manhattan Island, New York.
is vulnerable to water.
Over the course of a day,
I will take the work apart,
and give it to you.
In taking a piece of the work
—to care for, use, neglect, destroy—
you partake of the vulnerability
of our shared home, planet Earth,
and participate in our collective desire
to mobilize community for climate action.
GABRIELA SALAZAR, 2020 - 2021
LOW RELIEF FOR HIGH WATER was commissioned by the Climate Museum for the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, April 2020, and was postponed because of the global Covid-19 pandemic to October, 2021.
Presented in Washington Square Park, NYC
LOW RELIEF FOR HIGH WATER
is made of water-soluble paper
and methyl-cellulose,
a water-based non-toxic adhesive.
is cast from the windows of my childhood home,
an apartment in which I currently live, again,
on Manhattan Island, New York.
is vulnerable to water.
Over the course of a day,
I will take the work apart,
and give it to you.
In taking a piece of the work
—to care for, use, neglect, destroy—
you partake of the vulnerability
of our shared home, planet Earth,
and participate in our collective desire
to mobilize community for climate action.
GABRIELA SALAZAR, 2020 - 2021
LOW RELIEF FOR HIGH WATER was commissioned by the Climate Museum for the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, April 2020, and was postponed because of the global Covid-19 pandemic to October, 2021.
Holding Patterns
2021
2021
Holding Pattern, Walls (for Mara)
Existing studio walls, graphite powder.
Holding Pattern, Column (for Gene)
Salt-fired ceramic.
Holding Pattern, Trapdoor (for Sylvia)
Linen, cotton thread.
Holding Pattern, Handrail (for Al)
Paper pulp, cardboard, wood, zinc handrail brackets.
River Valley Arts Collective at
The Al Held Foundation, NY
Through a series of interventions and sculptural objects, the artist transforms the exhibition site into an autobiographical drawing of itself. The exhibition is organized in collaboration with the Al Held Foundation in Boiceville, NY.
The site of intervention is a former hayloft modified by the abstract sculptor Sylvia Stone (1928–2011) who worked in the smaller of the two studios within Held’s Boiceville complex. To suit her practice, Stone added an oversized trap door in the floor to streamline the transport of large plexiglass and acrylic sheets used in her large-scale geometric works. The loft eventually became Held’s drawing studio in the latter part of his career when a connecting interior staircase was added and was subsequently used by the abstract painter Mara Held and is now reactivated by Salazar.
Through sculpture, drawing, writing, and site interventions, Salazar’s projects investigate the relationship between human-made spaces and structures and the unpredictable or invisible forces — the shifting of land, the pressures of gravity, the passing and layering of time and use — that act upon them. Ultimately, her work charts the psychic and physical effects of change. Salazar often uses found materials and sites, engaging in wordplay, psychogeography, and phenomenology to bring out new associations between the found, the altered, and the made.
The main component of Salazar’s presentation is a one-to-one drawing of the negative space created by the behind-the-scenes wall studs and cleats of the studio’s two facing walls. Applying graphite powder directly onto the walls’ external surface, Salazar produces an off-kilter grid through the act of transference of the interior structure. Conceived as a collaborative drawing that considers the studio’s past occupants, the work incorporates the underlying structure as it compounds history of the walls’ use by making visible the subtleties that layers of white paint aim to hide: remaining traces of wall spackle, surface grain, fingerprints, protrusions and dents. By revealing this past use of the wall surface, the work draws attention to its literal make and measure and serves as a kind of map of the history of the room and how it came to be.
Further drawing on the architecture of the site — the trap door, support column, and hand rail — the artist considers the psychic space and the physical mechanics of holding through sculptural interventions. Pointedly, the textile, paper pulp, and salt-fired ceramic works perform a mimesis — an imitation of the room’s structural forms and architecture — as they embody a constellation of ideas Salazar formed around the notion of holding and to hold; conceptually tying together the use of the studio-as-surface/container/repository, the geographical proximity of the Ashokhan Reservoir, an on-site ceramic silo, the act of filling and draining, the dramatic relocation of Boiceville, the water system that supplies New York City, the artist’s own upbringing and motherhood, sustenance, support, commitment, resentment, containment, transference, osmosis, preparedness, life and death.
The Al Held Foundation, NY
Through a series of interventions and sculptural objects, the artist transforms the exhibition site into an autobiographical drawing of itself. The exhibition is organized in collaboration with the Al Held Foundation in Boiceville, NY.
The site of intervention is a former hayloft modified by the abstract sculptor Sylvia Stone (1928–2011) who worked in the smaller of the two studios within Held’s Boiceville complex. To suit her practice, Stone added an oversized trap door in the floor to streamline the transport of large plexiglass and acrylic sheets used in her large-scale geometric works. The loft eventually became Held’s drawing studio in the latter part of his career when a connecting interior staircase was added and was subsequently used by the abstract painter Mara Held and is now reactivated by Salazar.
Through sculpture, drawing, writing, and site interventions, Salazar’s projects investigate the relationship between human-made spaces and structures and the unpredictable or invisible forces — the shifting of land, the pressures of gravity, the passing and layering of time and use — that act upon them. Ultimately, her work charts the psychic and physical effects of change. Salazar often uses found materials and sites, engaging in wordplay, psychogeography, and phenomenology to bring out new associations between the found, the altered, and the made.
The main component of Salazar’s presentation is a one-to-one drawing of the negative space created by the behind-the-scenes wall studs and cleats of the studio’s two facing walls. Applying graphite powder directly onto the walls’ external surface, Salazar produces an off-kilter grid through the act of transference of the interior structure. Conceived as a collaborative drawing that considers the studio’s past occupants, the work incorporates the underlying structure as it compounds history of the walls’ use by making visible the subtleties that layers of white paint aim to hide: remaining traces of wall spackle, surface grain, fingerprints, protrusions and dents. By revealing this past use of the wall surface, the work draws attention to its literal make and measure and serves as a kind of map of the history of the room and how it came to be.
Further drawing on the architecture of the site — the trap door, support column, and hand rail — the artist considers the psychic space and the physical mechanics of holding through sculptural interventions. Pointedly, the textile, paper pulp, and salt-fired ceramic works perform a mimesis — an imitation of the room’s structural forms and architecture — as they embody a constellation of ideas Salazar formed around the notion of holding and to hold; conceptually tying together the use of the studio-as-surface/container/repository, the geographical proximity of the Ashokhan Reservoir, an on-site ceramic silo, the act of filling and draining, the dramatic relocation of Boiceville, the water system that supplies New York City, the artist’s own upbringing and motherhood, sustenance, support, commitment, resentment, containment, transference, osmosis, preparedness, life and death.
— Olga Dekalo, 2021
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
Photography by Inna Svyatsky.
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
Photography by Inna Svyatsky.
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