Gabriela Salazar’s Diaristic “No Shoulder”
Installation view of Gabriela Salazar: No Shoulder. Courtesy of the artist and Efraín López.
I first became familiar with Gabriela Salazar’s work while still in college. She taught sculpture classes, and I was intrigued by her ideas of art existing amid the ongoing climate crisis and how sculptures interacted with space. But, I truly grew enamored during my final year of school, when she began installing her solo exhibition Observed at Sarah Lawrence’s visual arts center. My museum studies class visited her in progress, and I found it especially moving that she used her home as the origin for her work: There was such close attention and love towards these familiar spaces she evoked. She recreated the rooms in her Upper West Side apartment with such intimacy and closeness to life––something I had not experienced in an exhibition.
What particularly touched me was that the sculptures in Observed were designed not to exist forever. Salazar utilized water-soluble paper as her primary material for the sculptures in Observed. Salazar’s intentionality engages critically with what it means to create with temporary material, in a time where life itself is so fleeting. I connected with her work so deeply that I spent my last year of school writing and researching Observed for a capstone paper. Salazar’s sculptures were textured and subject to change. They were models of care in the face of climate change.
Installation view of Gabriela Salazar: No Shoulder. Courtesy of the artist and Efraín López.
Salazar’s newest show, No Shoulder, opened at Efraín López on November 8, featuring ten drawings and a sculptural piece. The drawings come from images Salazar took on her iPhone earlier this year. About the drawings, curator Ana Torok writes: “[A]n attunement to interconnectedness rhymes rows of wrapped cables with the knotty roots of trees, or the spidery cracks in a sidewalk with the network of wrinkles across a multi-generational set of hands.” Whenever I encounter Salazar’s work in a gallery, I’m inclined to really think about the specifics of the space itself too––how lived in the space is, how the works themselves occupy the space, and how the space exists without these works inside it. Upon walking into Efraín López, visitors are instructed to take an accompanying booklet at the front of the space that, when unfolded entirely, reveals every image Salazar captured as references for these works. This specific detail is striking; it brings a reality to these drawings, but it also points to the incredibly diaristic elements of Salazar’s practice. The booklet acts as an archive, bringing these two variations of the image together.
At the entrance of the show, Compendium (1) (2024)—a sculpture made from steel, aluminum, and found steel rub—greets the viewer first. It articulates hands most clearly, as well as circular and rectangular shapes. The structure is bodily, tall, and sprawled out in a way that makes it feel human. One doesn’t merely look at Compendium (1); one walks around it, embodying and inhabiting. Compendium (1) casts a shadow that appears almost ghostly on the wall. It’s compelling to look at Compendium (1) alongside Salazar’s drawings. Both mediums work to freeze very fleeting moments, and without moving further into the exhibition, it becomes clear that No Shoulder continues to be a meditation on the fragility of time and the desire to arrest it.
Gabriela Salazar, A tender catastrophe, only in sleep (2024). Graphite on paper, 22.5 x 30 in / 57.1 x 76.2 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Efraín López.
I continue to spend a lot of time with A tender catastrophe, only in sleep (2024), a drawing that appears as a diptych of different manifestations of softness and fragility; on the left side, Salazar depicts a tree being knocked down, and on the right, her daughter Lucia. There is so much texture in the tree that it can be discerned as having existed for many years before its captured destruction. There’s an added sense of immediacy surrounding the juxtaposition of mortality and life, aging and youth, considering that the tree at one point existed beyond the two-dimensional picture plane. Lucia appears throughout Salazar’s work, in both obvious and more subtle ways. In Observed, through a sculptural visual language, Salazar recreates Lucia’s room and uses her toys as etching materials; in the aforementioned drawing in No Shoulder, Lucia herself is present. The inclusion of Lucia points to a sense of tender vulnerability and fragility, and putting her in conversation with the chopped-down tree brings the viewer to think more about futurity.
Detail of Gabriela Salazar, Two mothers, filing nails, 30 ⅛ x 22 ⅜ in (76 ½ x 56.8 cm), graphite on paper (2024). Photo by Colette Bernheim. Courtesy of the artist and Efraín López.
In Two mothers, filing nails (2024), ponderance about the intergenerational prevails, and love and gentleness continue to appear. The hands themselves work as textures, layered on top of each other, and in this positioning, they also open up more layers of interpretation. Salazar utilizes graphite to add richness to the background but also to bring softer, lighter details on the duvet. The multi-generational is an archive in itself, part of cataloging one’s personal history. As I look at Two mothers more, I find myself dialing back to this attention to the archive, specifically the idea of archiving the every day, recording the ritualistic and the familiar. When I first researched Salazar, I was aware of how interior and diaristic her work is. The phone camera is a diary, as are the canvas and the studio. Two mothers is also a demonstration of care, and it manifests in so many ways: maternal care, care for space, for health, and for home. While the moment depicted in the drawing is seemingly regular and routine, Salazar captures the very passage of time.
Installation view of Gabriela Salazar: No Shoulder. Courtesy of the artist and Efraín López.
I linger on ideas of care as I reach the show’s end. The thought of preserving a memory at all is also an act of care, and throughout No Shoulder and Salazar’s body of work, this idea is emphasized. Torok writes that Salazar’s work “speaks ambiguously to both repair and disrepair,” also bringing up her attention to binaries of “exterior/interior” and “neglect/care.” This truly cuts to the core of Salazar’s practice, which is so much about the art of observation. No Shoulder acts as a notebook and encourages us to perhaps look and listen more critically in our everyday encounters.
Gabriela Salazar: No Shoulder is on view at Efraín López from November 8 to December 21, 2024.
