Ari Salka

|

Recent Exhibition:

October 14 - November 11, 2023.

Skins, Holes, and Hovels

Ari Salka, Erica Everage, Kento Saisho

Documentation:

+ Checklists (Group; Salka)

|

With Salka’s diaristic approach to their hybrid drawings-paintings, glimpses of a body’s poetic transformations recur in the relations between expression, figuration, memory, and mark-making. Initially and ultimately, their works affectively archive and record the possible writings of a body on a surface while developing a literal and letteral—material and embodied—language through imprints, strokes, and gestures. Their poetically titled, small-scale drawings included in the group exhibition Skins, Holes, and Hovels, many of which display autobiographical fragments of a body marked by transitions and recoveries, find a synchrony between gestural marks and expressive distortions through a minimal (but necessarily elaborate) process of giving an account of themselves. An archaeological layering of intimately distanced instances of an “I.”

The deep temporal range of the production of the pieces themselves reiterates the transitional sequence on their timestamped bodies. (Some works take several years to complete, as with Reconciling (2009-2022)). Written in shards, these notational accounts arrive shattered but bound by a (w)hole. And with the perforated edgings of the paper often left intact, a disconnected continuity—the rimming of a lack, hole, or cut—is also performed on the level of the piece of paper itself: the surface of the depicted figures, and the surface of the object itself, arrive in the same instant of -piction. 

This tension between act, imprint, and surface is sustained across all of their work, but the recorded history becomes more painterly layered and figurally populated when they move from notebook paper to larger-scale canvas or panel. Playfully traumatic, each layer, and each mark, remembers a moment of contact between Salka against some instance of their skin.

….

Bio

Ari Salka (b. 1993 in Seattle, WA) is an LA-based artist who primarily works through writing, painting, and drawing. Salka holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2016) and MFA in Painting from UCLA (2019). In addition, Salka studied at the Yale Norfolk Summer School of Art and received the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship in Norfolk, CT (2015). Their most recent solo exhibition was with Lauren Powell Projects (Los Angeles). In November 2023, they are invited to be a visiting artist as part of Bennington College’s visiting artist lecture series.

{Biographical Information Courtesy of the Artist}

____

Exhibitions with the Gallery: