Lynden artists-in-residence Open Kitchen (OK) = resume their seasonal residency + food-related programming with summer resident Chris Salas at the Lynden Sculpture Garden. Part one of Salas’s residency aligns with OK’s Cultural Garden expansion at Lynden. Chris will study and amend clay bodies sourced from the grounds around the Cultural Garden and give shape to a collection of objects in anticipation of a pit firing in the fall. This second residency will coincide with the garden’s final harvest.
Chris Salas (they/them) is an artist and educator primarily working in ceramics. Their studio practice is a search for a particular mental state – the engaged and unconscious divergence and convergence of ideas that imbue themselves into objects. These objects become abstracted forms of personal experiences, relationships, conversations, research – all of which currently revolves around time, place, momentum, with a pervasive presence of the history of colonization of the Americas. Chris received a BA in Chemistry from Michigan State University and an MFA in Ceramics from Cranbrook Academy of Art. They have completed residencies at Northern Clay Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota; at Ceramics School in Hamtramck, Michigan; at Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in Newcastle, Maine; and at Starworks Ceramics in Star, North Carolina. In 2023, Chris will be attending a residency at Township10 in North Carolina. They are a Visiting Artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago through the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design (AICAD) Post-Graduate Teaching Fellowship.
Self-seasoning is a conceptual framework for building sustainable and ethical land relationships. The framework entwines ideas of self-organizing, seasonality, and a collective effort to identify an individual’s “sense of seasoning” by way of cookery. It is a field of food-related correspondences between artists and their ecological entanglements. A conceptual stone soup made of meaningful ideas that perform as ingredients for guests to repurpose in their food excursion (upon their tasting/finding). This collective project aims to influence a critical organizing process that strategizes ecological reciprocity.
Project support provided by The Open Fund, through the Poor Farm with funding from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and Ruth Foundation for the Arts and by the Lynden Sculpture Garden.
Events
Open Kitchen: OK, Sss: Chris Salas, Pt. 1
Artist Talk and Cookout
Sunday, July 7, 2024 – 2-4 pm
Fee: Free but advance registration required.
Registration: Space is limited; advance registration required. Register online or by phone at 414-446-8794.
OK hosts an informal artist-talk/cook-out with artist-in-residence Chris Salas. OK will be serving experimental “make-break-ends-meet-link” brat-style grilled links without a beginning or an end, without a clue, but with many opinions, and an assortment of garden-made accompaniments.
Open Kitchen: OK, Sss: Chris Salas, Pt. 1
Open Studio: “pinch garden clay body”
Monday, July 8, 2024 – 1:30-4:30 pm
Fee: Free.
Drop into the residency studio to handle garden clay bodies with OK and Chris Salas, sit silently shaping, voice your thoughts, listen to the birds, go for a walk, treat yourself to an impromptu collective pinching meditation.
