Gabriela Salazar:
Holding Patterns

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River Valley Arts Collective is pleased to announce Holding Patterns, an exhibition of new work by Gabriela Salazar curated by Olga Dekalo and organized in collaboration with the Al Held Foundation in Boiceville, NY.

Through a series of interventions and sculptural objects, Salazar has transformed a former hayloft, the smaller of two studios within Held’s live/work complex, into an autobiographical drawing of itself.

Modified by the abstract sculptor Sylvia Stone (1928–2011) to suit her practice, the space includes an oversized trap door that was installed in the floor to streamline the transport of 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. It 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/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 locations, 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 wall studs and cleats on the verso of the studio’s two facing walls. Applying graphite powder directly onto their external surfaces, Salazar produces an off-kilter grid through the act of transference of the underlying structure. Conceived as a collaborative drawing that considers the studio’s past occupants, the work incorporates the evidence of construction and renovations as it compounds the 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 historical map of the room and its evolution.

Further drawing on the architecture of the site—the trap door, support column, and handrail—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.

Gabriela Salazar (b. 1981, New York, NY) earned an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design (2009), a BA from Yale University (2003), and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture (2011). Her forthcoming and recent solo exhibitions include Low Relief for High Water, The Climate Museum, New York, NY (October 2021); Eye of Palm, Efrain Lopez Gallery, Chicago, IL (2016); My Lands are Islands, NURTUREArt, Brooklyn, NY (2015); and In Advance of a Storm (for Luis and Antonia) (for A and L) (for parents) (for two), Lighthouse Works, Fishers Island, NY (2014). Salazar’s work has been included in group exhibitions at David Nolan Gallery; Queens International 2018, Queens Museum; Socrates Sculpture Park; Indicators, Storm King Art Center; Abrons Art Center; The Drawing Center; and El Museo del Barrio; among other institutions and venues. Salazar has been awarded fellowships and residencies at Abrons Art Center (2018), The Drawing Center’s Open Sessions program (2017), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace (2015), Yaddo (2012), MacDowell (2009), and Yale-Norfolk School of Art (2002).