NYAB Event - Carolyn Salas Exhibition

Carolyn Salas Exhibition

Koenig & Clinton

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Koenig & Clinton presents the gallery’s first solo exhibition of recent and new sculptures by Brooklyn-based artist Carolyn Salas. The presentation includes large-scale wall reliefs as well as freestanding sculptures that highlight the artist’s skillful manipulation of one material to emulate another. With wry economy, the artist reimagines the properties of salvaged materials.

Salas’ sculptural practice shuttles between tactile verisimilitude and visual cues. Rooted in her central intention to push the elastic possibilities of her medium, the precise rendering of life-like detail coyly subsumes multiple production processes. The large, lead-colored Movement Studies (No. 1) (2015) underscores this focus, hanging on the wall like a drawn line escaped from the page. Hinged at its two upper corners, its belly droops as if molten and succumbing to gravitational pull.

The similarly hued loop, Zero (2015), appears to balance tenuously between the floor and an adjacent wall, threatening a noisy collapse. Throughout the gallery space, a range of steely plaster coils writhe about the floor and atop pedestals, as though they were the twisted knots of metallic guts.

Set apart in the space, freestanding planar structures jut upwards from the floor, pointing to the hidden framework of built walls and industrial supports. Formed at a human scale, these edifices respond to their surroundings — architecture, artworks, and viewers alike. Their jagged white edges recall ancient ruins or construction sites, a nod to those structures that have crumbled over time, or those left unrealized.

A selection of Aqua-Resin reliefs from the artist’s ongoing series The Breakups overturn expectations about what is temporary and what is permanent. By casting the roughly hewn blocks of Styrofoam refuse, Salas conflates structural integrity and weight with the appearances of airiness and disposability.

Throughout her installation, Salas orchestrates a series of tight juxtapositions that playfully question the viewer’s perceptions of volume, weight, and time. Each sculpture plays at decoy, revealing the textural nuance of source objects well beyond the embodiment of the original.