Eva Salazar

Artist Statement

I am a process-based interdisciplinary (Indisciplinary) artist working at the intersection of sculpture and performance. My work combines dance, movement and voice with physical materials like ceramics and textiles: emphasizing Sensuality and Intimacy as experiential/intuitive forms of knowledge and radical connection.
I graduated from SAIC in 2020, where I was part of the first cohort to hold a BFA with Art History Thesis. I have a background in classical violin and jazz improvisation. In recent years, I have focused my practice in experimental voicework through the RoyHart technique, Butoh dance, and free improvisation as a way of merging my musical and visual arts practices.
Using what I call the Embodied Sculpture in conjunction with the Uninhibited Voice, I create sculptural objects, instruments, and performances which weave in and out of musical and theatrical languages.
I find connection between parties (artist-viewer, student-‘teacher’, audience-performer) : the meeting, to be the driving force behind my work. I create situations that challenge the viewer into decision-making and active participation. This is achieved through interactive sculpture, public space installations, time sensitive work and interactive performance. These gestures generate spaces which serve as a brief respite where radical empathy and intimacy between strangers can emerge. This intimacy does not require speaking, touching or thinking: it is created by simply being in the truest sense of the word. By emitting raw vocalizations together, or feeling the clay volume that results from the clenched fist of someone else’s hand, laying on the cavity of another’s body imprinted in sand, or witnessing a crumbling print in a public park, one can access the archaic self present in all humans, that which creates opportunities for intuiting the meaning of another through the senses alone.
Since the summer of 2024, I have been splitting my time between Chicago and Mexico City, where I grew up. I travel often between the two cities: my two homes, and I find that through this experience I honor my mixed race background, but more importantly, it allows me to use the privilege of my dual citizenship to share key aspects of these two diverging art scenes with one-another. I find that in the current political climate, cross-border collaborations are essential in re-establishing our humanity and empathy, not as nations, but as individuals existing within the context of diverging nations.