Gabriela Salazar Selections – A Person-Place Thing

Exhibition Statement

These are my preferences: home, body, street, grid. We move towards a daily displacement of zero in right turns only. And over and over. I will call it a person-place thing. 

This is probably because I now live and grew up in an apartment in Manhattan. Across the wide street from this apartment’s windows is a tall wall of rectangles that fills the entire field of vision; rectangles of people watching and sleeping in and under rectangles since they were laid, brick by brick, in 1961—though I have only been watching since 1983. I have spent so much more time in this one apartment than anywhere else in the world. There is infinite variety in this set of pieces, of planes, of persons.

I recently wondered, watching my daughter stack blocks before bed: What is the name for a three dimensional rectangle? It is not a cube, that’s a square. I knew cylinder, and prism.... Had I become dumb? Did I know this once, and just forget? (Box, brick....) I got my mother, an architect, on FaceTime and asked her what she thought and she said, with confidence, “It’s called a wood block.” Indignant, I said, “No, that’s just one way it appears, that’s not it’s name!” It doesn’t matter, but it’s a cuboid, if you need to know.

Is it true that our own two eyes will always share the same plane of vision? Is it a fact nestled against the horizon? Against a window pane? Parallel to the screen? Turning right at each corner of an image? Around the corner of a building on a march down a street?

And yet these works broke me out of one body, temporarily locating me with another. Another body in a place, shaped by place, literally or figuratively. Or, a location that definitely had some body in it. Or, a body located by living in a body, like a daughter.

I also thought of calling this selection “Dream House.” (As far as shapes go, my daughter prefers “moons and stars.”)