Chris Salas: Forms of Remembrance

Thursday, July 3, 2025 – 4-6 pm: Open Studio
Friday, July 11, 2025 – 5-7 pm: Open Studio (Pit Firing)

During Chris Salas’s summer residencies, they will be hosting open studio events. Drop into the residency studio to handle garden clay bodies with Salas, sit silently shaping, voice your thoughts, listen to the birds, go for a walk, and treat yourself to an impromptu collective pinching meditation.

In Forms of Remembrance, Chris Salas’s first solo exhibition, the artist explores material cultures as living reflections of ecological and ancestral relationships across the Americas. From ceramic, to dirt, to seed--what vibrant stories are held within their inanimacy?

Salas’s 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 revolve around time, place, and momentum—and are shaped by the pervasive presence of the history of colonization of the Americas. Their room-filling installation will bring the outdoors into the gallery, and will include ceramic objects and sound elements.

About the Artist

Chris Salas is an artist and educator based in Chicago, Illinois. They received a BA in Chemistry from Michigan State University and an MFA in Ceramics from Cranbrook Academy of Art. They have attended residencies at Northern Clay Center in Minneapolis, Ceramics School in Hamtramck, Michigan, Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in Newcastle, Maine, Starworks Ceramics in Star, North Carolina, and Township10 in Marshall, North Carolina. Salas teaches in Ceramics at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

This is a HOME exhibition.