River Valley Arts Collective: Gabriela Salazar

The Al Held Foundation is pleased to host Holding Patterns, an exhibition of new work by Gabriela Salazar, curated by Olga Dekalo and organized in partnership with River Valley Arts Collective. Through a series of interventions and sculptural objects, Salazar transforms the exhibition site—a historic hayloft turned art studio—into an autobiographical drawing of itself. The work will be on view through October 10th, as the final exhibition of the 2021 season in partnership with River Valley Arts Collective.

The main component of Salazar’s presentation is a one-to-one drawing of the negative space created by the behind-the-scenes wall studs and cleats of the studio’s two facing walls. Applying graphite powder directly onto the walls’ external surface, Salazar produces an off-kilter grid through the act of transference of the interior structure. Further mining the architecture of the site—a trapdoor, support column, and handrail—the artist considers the psychic space and the physical mechanics of “holding” through sculptural interventions composed of textile, paper pulp, and salt-fired ceramics. Conceived as a collaborative work that considers the studio’s past occupants (Al Held and Sylvia Stone, among others), Salazar's practice investigates the relationship between human-made spaces and structures and the unpredictable or invisible forces that act upon them.