Whether Break or Shape is on view through April 19
April 2024 – Drew University has welcomed Gabriela Salazar as artist-in-residence. Her exhibition, Whether Break or Shape, is on view through April 19 at The Korn Gallery.
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A reception and Q&A with Salazar will take place on Tuesday, April 16, from 4 – 6 p.m. in the Korn Gallery.
The exhibition, curated by Associate Teaching Professor of Art Jason Karolak, includes large-scale paper castings which incorporate natural and gathered materials and sculpted wall railings made from paper pulp and fired clay. The site-specific work was created during Salazar’s residency at Drew through research and a collaboration with students and faculty.
“We are thrilled to have Gabriela Salazar on Drew’s campus,” said Karolak. “This project extends Salazar’s ongoing meditation on our environmental state(s) and her rigorous investigation into natural materials, drawing and sculptural processes, and the compression of personal and human information. She draws specific inspiration from Drew’s historic Rose Window (currently hanging in the library), and the patched stone walls and old growth trees on campus. In the gallery, some elements float in delicate suspension, while others succumb to gravity or damage, inviting viewers to consider (and feel) notions of strength and vulnerability.”
“Whether Break or Shape comes from wondering about our response to change, crisis, grief, obstacle, difficulty, new circumstances,” said Salazar. “Whether plays on weather, a break in the weather, a new form of weather, a broken weather, a shape of the future gathering in the clouds and heat. It’s partly from a distance—looking back, was that a rupture? Or a reincarnation?… Facing climate change, what about our structures needs to be discarded—or entirely reinvented—and can we muster the imagination and will to get there?”
The Korn Gallery is located in the Dorothy Young Center for the Arts at Drew University and is open Tuesday through Friday from noon – 4 p.m. and by appointment.
