Gabriela Salazar, Hook Crook, Fair Foul, 2017–18. Mixed media installation with wood, paper pulp, plasticine, air-dry clay, resin, graphite powder, charcoal powder, bicycle hooks (steel and rubber). Courtesy of the artist.
Gabriela Salazar, Hook Crook, Fair Foul, 2017–18. Mixed media installation with wood, paper pulp, plasticine, air-dry clay, resin, graphite powder, charcoal powder, bicycle hooks (steel and rubber). Courtesy of the artist.
Gabriela Salazar, Hook Crook, Fair Foul, 2017–18. Mixed media installation with wood, paper pulp, plasticine, air-dry clay, resin, graphite powder, charcoal powder, bicycle hooks (steel and rubber). Courtesy of the artist.
Gabriela Salazar, Hook Crook, Fair Foul, 2017–18. Mixed media installation with wood, paper pulp, plasticine, air-dry clay, resin, graphite powder, charcoal powder, bicycle hooks (steel and rubber). Courtesy of the artist.
Gabriela Salazar, Hook Crook, Fair Foul, 2017–18. Mixed media installation with wood, paper pulp, plasticine, air-dry clay, resin, graphite powder, charcoal powder, bicycle hooks (steel and rubber). Courtesy of the artist.
Gabriela Salazar, Hook Crook, Fair Foul, 2017–18. Mixed media installation with wood, paper pulp, plasticine, air-dry clay, resin, graphite powder, charcoal powder, bicycle hooks (steel and rubber). Courtesy of the artist.
Gabriela Salazar
In recent sculptures I have been using the form of the handrail. The handrail is a system for support that bridges the space between a body and structure. These works play with the formal aspects of a handrail, but disrupt expectations of stability, assistance, or guidance with their precarity, vulnerability, and displacement. The materials I use to make the rails vary, but I often use plasticine, an oil-based clay that never completely hardens or dries, records its own making and the touch of curious viewers, and bridges the gap between the hand and the eye.

One series of rail, all titled Hook Crook, take on an ambiguous quality; each conceived of as a displaced section of railing, they do an uncomfortable double time as possible staff or baton, a "tool of support" defined more broadly. They wait, cantilevered, in large steel hooks set in the wall. The hooks are the kind you would find in a garage, and here they lend the railings a sense that they are a part of a system—tools. Hook Crook, Fair Foul in Queens International will be my largest yet, a sort of library of possible rails, with many hooks left open and empty.
Are these ideas of "disrupting expectations of stability, assistance, or guidance with inherent precarity, vulnerability, and displacement" connected to your experience as an educator? Are these ideas of "disrupting expectations of stability, assistance, or guidance with inherent precarity, vulnerability, and displacement" connected to your experience as an educator? I've taught for more than thirteen years, most of that high school and younger. I'm always aware of balancing supporting and guiding on the one hand with creating situations that allow for risk-taking and vulnerability on the other. Teaching reminds me that lining up our expectations and hopes for our lives and society with our limited grasp on both requires a continuous awareness and responsiveness. Neither our limits nor possibilities should be taken for granted.
It seems like the literal definitions of "volumes"—one of a series, the space contained, a measure of loudness—relate to ways of understanding Hook Crook, Fair Foul. The Hook Crook series are individual parts coming together in site-specific relationships, but that might be separated again, repurposed, or recombined. I think of a "volume" as part of a whole; a whole constructed and visible via a system for a particular set of knowledges or uses. The logic of an encyclopedia, catalogue, or collection, is idiosyncratic. In some systems, specific points of familiar contact lead us to believe we can create a sense of the entire logic, but total comprehension can be elusive.

The titles of the works in the Hook Crook series point to actions, indicating that verbs like waiting or accepting are active states, too: Hook Crook #3 (Giving When Pressed), Hook Crook #4 (Longing for Lawyers to Solve Our Problems), Hook Crook #10 (Pervert Your Focus), Hook Crook #13 (Takes No Show of Soft Forcing), Hook Crook #12 (Gave Good Conspiracy). I feel that the amplitude of each piece fluctuates with which other one is nearby. Their volume is relative to position and the group context.
It seems like the literal definitions of "volumes"—one of a series, the space contained, a measure of loudness—relate to ways of understanding Hook Crook, Fair Foul.
Gabriela Salazar (b. 1981, New York, NY) earned an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design (2009), a BFA from Yale University (2003), and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture (2011). She has had solo shows at Efrain Lopez Gallery, Chicago, IL (2016), NURTUREArt, Brooklyn, NY (2015), and through The Lighthouse Works’ Public Art Fellowship (2014). Salazar has exhibited in group exhibitions across the country, including at Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, NY (2018); The Drawing Center, New York, NY (2017); Triumph, Chicago, IL (2017); Planthouse, New York, NY (2016); Abrons Art Center, New York, NY (2015); El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY (2013); Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT (2013); and Control Room, Los Angeles, CA (2012). Salazar has been an artist-in-residence in numerous programs including AIR, Abrons Art Center (2018), Open Sessions, The Drawing Center (2017), Workspace, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (2015), Yaddo (2012), MacDowell (2009), and Yale-Norfolk School of Art (2002). She works in Ridgewood, Queens.
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