Avi Saliman

Avi Saliman is an emerging artist working primarily in sculptural and drawn media. Saliman’s practice aims to explore shifting paradigms of post-modernity and to create new contexts that exist in-between and in the margins of constructed life. His work relies on the designed world, investigating the histories of objects and interrogating the contexts in which they were produced and through which they’ve existed.

Saliman's artwork makes the monumental - unmonumental. His practice aims to explore shifting paradigms of the contemporary world, creating new contexts that exist in the margins of constructed life. The built world is a base from which Saliman's work creeps into an esoteric exploration of cultural paradoxes and psychological impulses. He relies heavily on artifacts, investigating the histories of their design and interrogating the framework in which they were produced and exist. Dichotomies, multiples, facsimiles, double entendres, contradictions, and other conceptual twins echo through Saliman's projects. Abstraction is a key tool, but not for its own sake; the specter of representation still haunts many of his most abstract pieces. There is often a goal of confusing the artwork to have it arrive in a liminal state where it's existing as something which it's not, a space where Saliman is able to explore mystical ideas through connection to the physical world. The modes of drawing that he employs allow the lines to blur between abstraction, representation, and language. The materials - simple paper, bricks, graphite, color pencil, sewing techniques - allow for a certain humbleness. Sewing at once damages and repairs. The mark and the stitch are poignant ways which Saliman reflects the dichotomies inherent in memory in all its fact and fiction.