Gabriela Salazar’s In Advance of a Storm Publication

Gabriela Salazar’s career is probably one of the most unconventional, minimalist, and abstract ones coming from Long Island City. As a New York native, she excelled in collaborations and asking the right questions through her art.

Her main target throughout her body of work has been to investigate the relationship between human-made spaces and structures and the unpredictable or invisible forces that act upon them. She highlights the changes due to the effect of what humans have created in the physical world. Her use of materials and sites, wordplay, psychogeography, and phenomenology have brought her a database of the different states of the found, the altered and the made. Her depth and commitment to finding answers, but most importantly asking questions, has led Salazar to explore her focus through sculpture, drawing, site interventions, and is now most recently working on writing and publishing.

Photo Courtesy of Gabriela Salazar

In Advance of a Storm documents her installation work which is dedicated to her parents Luis and Antonia (for A and L) that was constructed in the summer of 2014 as The Lighthouse Work’s first commissioned public artwork. The structures of In Advance of a Storm were located on two found platforms on Fishers Island, NY, and were each based on a cube, reconfigured to create a room. These rooms, and their contents, realized descriptions made by the artists’ architect parents in playing the Cube Game, a pop-psychology visualization. In this game, you are asked to respond to a set of prompts and describe the relationships and feelings associated with each. Your descriptions reveal insights into the inner mind and spirit.

Photo Courtesy of Gabriela Salazar

This publication contains photographic documentation of In Advance of a Storm, the original interviews between Salazar and her parents Luis and Antonia, and essays by architects Billie Tsien and Tod Williams, sculptor Amy Brener, and photographer Lucas Blalock. The covers are silkscreened by the artist and 50 of the books are a special edition that include a hand-letterpress card from the day of the opening.

The grand inauguration for Salazar’s published art book took place at Printed Matter in midtown Manhattan this past Wednesday, April 10.