COL is pleased to present Harriet Salmon: We Were Ill Prepared. This new series represent a succinct body of work influenced by traditional forms and techniques found in both Western and Eastern armor design. Interested in the process of protecting oneself, Salmon imagines a system of plating, reinforcing, masking, shielding and strengthening that implies the vulnerability of a physical body that is not present.

 

It’s difficult to imagine a future danger; impossible if there is no past reference to the danger’s form, language, aesthetics, or deceptions. In the current moment of impending climate crisis and political violence, how can we prepare ourselves effectively? Salmon’s fierce, organic and often ceremonial objects offer a possible, labor-intensive solution, one that tries desperately to predict an unseen threat. Maybe the act of preparing is enough? As if the labor of object-making can conjure the unknown into being and steady us for things to come that are beyond our comprehension.

 

When making these works, Salmon looked to artists Diane Simpson, Lee Bontecou, Bruce Conner, Deborah Remington, and Martin Puryear, whose understanding of materiality, craft, and symbol, gave her an object-language to lean on and adapt to our times.

 

Salmon (b. 1978, Macclesfield, UK) immigrated to the United States with her family in 1988. She received an Individualized BFA from California College of Arts and Crafts in 2002, an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University in 2006, and attended the MacDowell Colony and the Socrates Sculpture Park EAF residency in 2008. Her work has been exhibited at The Shirley Fiterman Art Center, Klaus von Nichtssagenden Gallery, Postmasters Gallery, and Ortega Y Gasset Gallery, all in New York, NY, and The Museum of Flight in Seattle, WA.

 

Her work is in the permanent collection of The Museum of Flight, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and The Whitney Museum of American Art.