Soledad Salame: Camouflage

Acts of environmental violence, from the casual to the catastrophic, seem to grow more commonplace and inconspicuous by the day. At the same time that consumer branding touting taglines of “natural, green, and eco-friendly” gain increasing currency in the marketplace, big business and industry continue to churn through natural resources with little consequence or regard. Global summits and regulation continually fail to gain traction or compliance in response, and eco-activists hurling paint upon art history feels daftly counterproductive. In this fraught context, Chilean-American artist Soledad Salame proposes a poetic form of intervention marrying art, research, and re-invention. Locating moments when nature’s resilience meets human resourcefulness, she works with an evolving team of scientific and ecological collaborators to create works as repositories of labor, resistance and reflection. Over decades of work and travel in service to this project, a subject and location she has returned to frequently is the Atacama Desert in northern Chile as a beleaguered site of pollution. It is most notably the site where millions of pounds of disposable textiles, often called “fast fashion,” are dumped and piled – to the degree they have become an uncanny part of the region’s topography. After visiting this site and feeling the depth of its impact, Salame has translated aerial photos of the festooned Atacama into dizzying camouflage fields where she traces weighty details with needle and thread. A sister process gives shape to humble dresses the artist has fashioned from recycled cotton fabric, in quiet aspiration of re-populating this distressed Anthropocene. In this exhibition, Salame’s new body of work is contextualized by past work she has created in Chile and other locations further afield – all unified by the sensitive and hopeful appraisal of environments forever (re)shaped by acts of humanity.