Gabriela Salazar, Leaves (We Move Together (September)), 2023. Photo credit: Jeanette May
(MADISON, NJ) -- Drew University artist-in-residence Gabriela Salazar's exhibition Whether Break or Shape is on view at The Korn Gallery through Friday, April 19, 2024. The exhibition, curated by Jason Karolak, includes large-scale paper castings which incorporate natural and gathered materials, and sculpted wall railings made from paper pulp and fired clay.
The Korn Gallery is located in the Dorothy Young Center for the Arts at Drew University and is open to the public Tuesday through Friday from 12:00 noon to 4:00pm. It is free to visit the gallery.
An artist reception will take place at the gallery at 4:00pm on Tuesday, April 16. This reception is free and open to the public.
“Whether Break or Shape comes from wondering about our response to change, crisis, grief, obstacle, difficulty, new circumstances," said Salazar. "Whether plays on weather, a break in the weather, a new form of weather, a broken weather, a shape of the future gathering in the clouds and heat. It’s partly from a distance -- looking back, was that a rupture? Or a reincarnation? Facing climate change, what about our structures needs to be discarded -- or entirely reinvented -- and can we muster the imagination and will to get there?”
The exhibition Whether Break or Shape developed out of Gabriela Salazar’s residency at Drew’s Dorothy Young Center for the Arts, during which she collaborated with students and faculty, conducted research, and produced new site-specific work in the Korn Gallery.
The exhibition is centered around an installation of large-scale paper castings, called Leaves, made by laying down prepared sheets of water-soluble paper over leaves, branches, food scraps, Salazar’s 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 it covers.
The paper works both hang on the wall and cut across the gallery space, and appear to be forming into or breaking apart from a fragmented circular form. The Leaves invite “frontal” viewing positions, as if viewers are looking at the graphic and pictorial relationships within a drawing or a painting, but they also carefully occupy dimensional space, suspended into a kind of mobile-like formation, inviting viewers to notice the architecture, windows, and their own positions within the gallery.
Along the walls of the space run pieces of handrails, sculpted from a water-soluble paper pulp with fired clay brackets, part of an ongoing series Salazar calls Supports. Some of these appear functional, while other fragments look to be broken, sagging or in disrepair. The imperfect handrail sculptures have the feel of uncanny personality and move the eye along the perimeter of the space with a sense of lyrical line.
This project extends Salazar’s ongoing meditation on environmental states and her rigorous investigation into natural materials, drawing and sculptural processes, and the compression of personal and human information. She draws specific inspiration from Drew’s historic Rose Window, currently hanging in the University library, and the patched stone walls and old growth trees on campus. In the gallery, some elements float in delicate suspension, while others succumb to gravity or damage, inviting views to consider notions of strength and vulnerability.
Gabriela Salazar was born in New York City to architects from Puerto Rico. She has had solo exhibitions at NURTUREart; The Bronx River Arts Center; The Lighthouse Works, Fishers Island; Efrain Lopez Gallery, Chicago; The River Valley Arts Collective at the Al Held Foundation, New York, and with the Climate Museum, in 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, Candice Madey Gallery, David Nolan Gallery, Someday Gallery, Storm King Art Center, and the Whitney Museum.
Salazar’s work has also appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, hyperallergic, and The Brooklyn Rail.
Residencies include Workspace (LMCC), Yaddo, MacDowell, Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Abrons Arts Center, “Open Sessions” at The Drawing Center, and the Socrates Emerging Artist Fellowship.
In 2023 she was named a NYFA/NYSCA Fellow in Craft/Sculpture from The New York Foundation of the Arts. She holds an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design, a BA from Yale University, and lives, works, and teaches in NYC.
Drew University, a Phi Beta Kappa liberal arts university, includes the College of Liberal Arts, Drew Theological School, and the Caspersen School of Graduate Studies. Drew is located on a beautiful, wooded campus in Madison, New Jersey.
Drew University has a total enrollment of more than 2,200 students and has 136 full-time faculty members. The Theological and Caspersen schools offer master’s and doctoral degrees, and the College confers BA and BS degrees in 40 disciplines, with 61 available minors, and offers 17 preprofessional and 19 dual-degree programs.
Drew also houses the Center on Religion, Culture & Conflict, the Center for Holocaust/Genocide Study, and the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, an independent professional theater, as well as the United Methodist Archives and History Center and one of the country’s leading concentrations of materials on Willa Cather.
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