Carolyn Salas | Buried Alive in the Blues

About

Carolyn Salas’s first solo exhibition with Mrs., "Buried Alive in the Blues," is titled for the Janis Joplin track that was to be recorded the day she died. Following her tragic death, her band recorded the instrumental without her voice, with its absence as a kind of memorial. Salas chose the song for the exhibition’s title for its resonance with the past year and all its losses, and for the way it chimes with her monumental white cut-aluminum sculptures as they emerge from the intense blue gallery floor. Taking space and marking absence, Salas’s works intercut the personal and archetypal, stability and dynamism, emergence and disappearance.

Salas’s works begin as maquettes cut by hand from foam core. Scaled up into cut metal planar forms, with elements that bend away or intersect at angles, the works retain their wobbly hand-cut edges, showing the spontaneity of the artist’s hand. Their white painted surfaces reference cultural and personal connotations of death and absence, while also carrying the modernist white of gallery walls into three dimensions. The sculptures’ scale, indexed to the artist’s own height, references and insists on the physical fact of the artist’s presence. The gendered artist-body is echoed into the sculptural body in the gallery’s space, yet these are not precisely self-portraits, but an approximate sorority—a field of female figural associations.

In conceiving her works, Salas looks to Greek caryatid figures that effortlessly bear the weight of stone buildings, and also the dynamism of women’s movement in ancient friezes and reliefs. The figures, in their cut forms and blue-white chroma, might also reference the buoyant swimmers of Matisse’s "The Swimming Pool." Stable and active, Salas’s figures are dynamic actors within the often-rectilinear frame-like spaces of the sculptures themselves, and in the gallery’s architectural surround. The continuous movement of the viewer animates these works, making them flicker between visual configurations; from one angle, "Kneeling Figure" interlinks the fragmented torsos of women’s mannequins with the alert stance of a Parthenon archer; from another, the planes flatten before making a pyramidal wedge. The sculptures operate, though freestanding, as though they are very high relief carvings against which the gallery’s volume of space is a kind of surface.

The dramatic setting for Salas’s exhibition is an Yves-Klein-Blue-esque floor hemmed by white walls. Ceramic-tiled plinths surface the larger white sculptures, connoting the blue/white contrast and tile of the Mediterranean. Salas chose the floor’s blue for its richness, for the ways Klein conceived his signature color as inherently spiritual. In addition to its art historical reference, Salas welcomed blue’s natural referents: sea and sky. The forms emerge from the oceanic blue, and then against white walls, threaten to dissolve.

Salas’s choice of white paint derives from her association of the color with mourning and loss. While the floor is suffused with color, the sculptures are devoid of it. Moving through the exhibition, light and shadow transform heavy material into floating line drawings. Alternately thrown into relief by shadow and the contrasting blue floor, or flattened against the white walls, an interplay of loss and emergence involves the viewer in an unfolding play of visibilities.

People speculate about how Janis Joplin would have sung "Buried Alive in the Blues." Her unsinging voice hangs in the air over the instrumental that should have played beneath it. The void of her voice outlines a space of possibility the song leaves blank; we can almost picture how it would feel for her voice to rise over the rhythm’s ground, a recovered loss, alive, whole, and shifting.

-Amy Rahn

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Carolyn Salas was born in Hollywood, CA. She earned a BFA in sculpture from the College of Santa Fe and an MFA from Hunter College. She has attended residencies at the Abrons Art Center A.I.R. Space Program and The NARS Foundation, New York, NY; Blue Mountain Center, Blue Mountain Lake, NY; the Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT; and the Santa Fe Art Institute, Santa Fe, NM. She has also been a Chashama Studio Space recipient, and an Elizabeth Foundation Studio Program/Space awardee. Selected exhibitions include the Berkshire Museum, Berkshire MA; Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, Santa Barbara; Ever Gold [Projects], San Francisco, CA; Casey Kaplan, Koenig & Clinton, Brookfield Arts, SPRING/BREAK Art Show and Kate Werble Gallery, New York, Mrs., Maspeth, NY; Terrault Contemporary and Towson University, Baltimore, MD; Páramo Gallery, Guadalajara, Mexico; and NADA Special Projects, Miami, FL. Most recently, Salas was awarded Artist-in-Residence at Stoneleaf Retreat, NY, for summer 2022.

This exhibition will be on view May 22 - July 2, 2021.  For available works, press inquiries and additional information, please contact hello@mrsgallery.com.