MILWAUKEE, WI.- Chris Salas: Forms of Remembrance opened at the Lynden Sculpture Garden on Saturday, August 23, 2025. In Forms of Remembrance, 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? The exhibition remains on view through Sunday, November 2, 2025.

Forms of Remembrance, Chris Salas’s first solo exhibition, emerged from an abiding interest in the relationship between heritage, memory, materials, and material culture. During summer residencies at the Lynden Sculpture Garden in 2024 and 2025, these interests became rooted in Lynden’s landscape and particularly the gardens stewarded by artists-in-residence Open Kitchen (Rudy Medina and Alyx Christensen). At Lynden, Salas was able to dig local clay and incorporate the garden’s living matter in the clay body they produced.

Salas’s room-filling installation at Lynden brings the outdoors into the gallery. The artist arranges twenty ceramic sculptures on a clay-clad platform—a large-scale sculpture in itself—and further activates the installation with recorded sound emanating from speakers within four of the sculptures. Salas works across four archetypal forms: seeds, grids, resonators, and offering bowls. The sculptures reference both architecture and the land, and the seed forms, in particular, are loosely figurative. When viewed together, as a kind of miniature city, or an archaeological ruin, the tension between density and openness, between roots and bowls, between past and present, becomes apparent. Corn, precious to Indigenous peoples, appears across the installation in different guises: cast in silver, as dried kernels, placed in the bowls and on surfaces.

By massing their sculptures on a grid, Salas illustrates what the political philosopher Jane Bennett describes as the power of “vibrant matter.” Bennett recognizes the “active participation of nonhuman forces in events,” positing a vital materiality that animates the human and nonhuman, coming together in configurations that generate agency. They also focus our attention on earth—soil—as an intermediary between different material histories, and the contrasting time scales of the human and non-human worlds.

Salas describes their studio practice as 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.

Chris Salas is an artist and educator based in Chicago, Illinois and Muncie, Indiana. 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 is currently an assistant teaching professor of Studio Art at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana.