Gabriela Salazar “My Lands are Islands”
NURTUREart
This event has ended.
In this project Salazar continues her exploration of using the form of a simple machine (the wedge / shim) to perform its usefulness through allegorical “work”. Here, the wedges are made of a rudimentary clay of coffee grounds, an ingredient that comes out of her family’s history as a part of Puerto Rico’s coffee trade.
These small serial works are then exhibited on pedestals made of a white glazed brick reminiscent of the material used in condominium construction in NYC during the 1950’s and 60’s. These “pedestals”, while referring to urban architecture, also play with the forms of minimalist sculpture, in essence opening up an intersection between the ur object and the heterogeneity of the social / cultural city.
My Lands are Islands is not only a meditation on histories but also itself a conflation of temporalities. The coffee-clay is unstable at Salazar’s chosen scale and hence the wedge sculptures will collapse and deteriorate over the run of the exhibition. The wedges perform this collapse at a peculiarly stubborn rate; too slow to watch but frustrating to any sense of the permanent or archival. This cycle of binding and breaking apart is an interesting foil to the temporalities of both the ever-changing city and the timelessness central to Minimalism’s grand narrative.
Salazar’s project is then a conflation of historical narratives dealing with issues of colonialism, modernism, minimalism, urbanism and feminism drawn from her own making and her personal history.
Media
Schedule
from January 09, 2015 to February 06, 2015
Opening Reception on 2015-01-09 from 19:00 to 21:00