alexis elton

As an exploration of many metaphorical qualities of salt, this research-based installation incorporated nets, cells, catchment systems, webs — all of which were taken over by salt and crystallized over time. Commissioned for the exhibition, Geohaptics: Sensing Climate, at 516Arts in Albuquerque, NM. It was curated by Daniela Naomi Molnar and funded by the NEA. The following statement is from the exhibition's catalog and was written by Molnar.

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Many definitions of art center on its non-utility, its capacity to slow or alter time, and its potential to wear down our perceptual callouses, to return familiar things to their original strangeness. Alexis Elton's work weaves these artistic mores to rcast the familiar substance of salt into novel forms. Her "crystalline time capsules" are the trace of prolonged "ceremonies of healing experiments," long and intensive experimental research and ritual exploration of salt, a quotidian substance which is integral to the daily life of the planet and our bodies, not to mention lunch. Salt embodies the ecological flows of water, sunlight, earth, sweat, and money. It is integral to the human body, other bodies, the economy, and the earth. Drawing from all these roles of salt, Elton's installation asks us to imagine salt as a medium via which to explore "the unknowable and the invisible" so that we might see, feel, and understand ourselves and our earth anew. 

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Working with "site as a material," Elton brings our attention to a lesser-known consequence of our planet's shifting weather patterns and rising temperatures: these changes cause solis to dry out, allowing salts in the soil to accumulate. This degrades the soil and interferes with plants' ability to draw nourishment from it, reducing agricultural productivity. "In exposing these ragile balances," Elton says, "I bring attention to our own fragility and our possibilities to reorient." 

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The ritual underlying the creation of this work are a crucial part of its meaning. Ritual has the unique capacity to create embodied knowledge of the ethical complexity of our lives. Elton's work reminds us to remain open to the complexity of matter, its multiple coexistent truths. She invites us to see salt as "evidence of balance and remembrance in the human body and in the land."

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By creating ritual structure and actions -- "amulets, nets, cells, catchment systems, spider webs, spheres, fibers, utensils, shapes of time" -- Elton explores salt's many metaphorical qualities in her life in the life of the earth: "trust, starts and stops, tears, my Jewishness, Passover, bitter herbs, remembrance, sacrifice, landscape, grief, wicking bodies, clarification, my mother's hallucinations, salt licks, deserts, excitement, heat, gratitude, love sweat stains, condensation, gravity, DNA."