LOW RELIEF FOR HIGH WATER
On Sunday, October 10, 2021 in Washington Square Park we presented a day of participatory art and climate community building with artist Gabriela Salazar. Low Relief for High Water was Salazar’s performative, interactive exploration on themes of home, vulnerability, caretaking, and collective responsibility in the face of climate change through the medium of a sculpture crafted from water-soluble paper. The artist invited visitors to take a piece of her sculpture, cast directly from her own home, and interact with it as a surface upon which to actively contemplate their own experiences. At a time when the convergence of the climate crisis with an ongoing pandemic requires profound personal and community resilience, Low Relief’s messages resonated deeply, building connection and resolve.
If home is a place where we are supposed to feel safe, how will we respond when it is our home that needs saving?
Low Relief’s themes and Salazar’s process were beautifully documented in a short film produced and edited by Micah Fink and shot by Tom Hurwitz. The film is now streaming on YouTube and PBS.org, presented by Peril and Promise of The WNET Group.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Gabriela Salazar has recently exhibited at Socrates Sculpture Park, the Queens Museum, and Storm King Art Center; and her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, hyperallergic, and The Brooklyn Rail. Salazar has been selected for the City Artist Corps Grants program, presented by The New York Foundation for the Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, with support from the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment as well as Queens Theatre. Her residencies include the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and The Lighthouse Works, and she was a participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. Salazar holds an MFA from RISD and a BA from Yale University.
ABOUT Low RELIEF FOR HIGH WATER
Low Relief for High Water was a public installation centered around a sculpture constructed from overlapping fragments of water-soluble paper molded directly from a windowed wall in the artist’s childhood apartment—the home she returned to after the birth of her now-toddler daughter. Salazar broke off pieces of the sculpture to give to visitors. In choosing to interact or not interact with the piece, the performance explored the agency we each have to participate in moments of shared public responsibility. The large, distinctive casements called our attention to safety and vulnerability, to the longing for a timeless home, and the jeopardy of our built environment in the context of climate change.
Eighteen months of a global pandemic and two devastating flooding events in NYC later, the need for a shared communal response was more palpable than ever before.
EVENT DETAILS
Low Relief was presented on October 10, 2021 in Washington Square Park, Garibaldi Plaza from 10am - 5pm.
Adjacent programming for all ages offered on-ramps to collective action and resolve: a climate psychologist to discuss climate emotions in a public, non-clinical setting, civic action opportunities, and multiple ways to interact with the artwork.
The project was made possible in part with support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and the City Artist Corps Grants program.
