Gabriela Salazar

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Examining the modes and measures of knowledge that are transmitted—visibly and invisibly—via structure and stuff, I approach the built and found environment, personal history, and material, as frameworks for site-responsive installations and sculpture. These works engage the relational and associative possibilities inherent in medium, architecture, the body, selfhood, and place. My investigations have led me to use “found” forms like handrails and “velvet rope;” and materials as varied as used coffee grounds, concrete blocks, plasticine, ceramic, hooks, and water soluble paper. Throughout runs a fascination with the phenomenology of site; the ways architecture is (mis)repurposed towards contemporary needs; rule-making (and bending) as a strategy for uncovering idealizations and uncertainty in experience and expectations; and the large-and-small consequences of intentionality, ambition, limit, and failure.

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, David Nolan Gallery and Storm King Art Center. Salazar’s work has also appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, hyperallergic, and The Brooklyn Rail. Residencies include Workspace (LMCC); Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Abrons Arts Center, “Open Sessions” at The Drawing Center, and the Socrates Emerging Artist Fellowship. She holds an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design, a BA from Yale University, and lives, works, and teaches in NYC.