Memory, Silence, and Dreams Our visit to renowned calligram artist Elisa Salas' Oaxacan exhibition

Last weekend, the Oaxaca Times visited the Copal gallery space to interview Mexico City-based artist Elisa Salas about her current exhibition. Her work is very unique because as an accomplished poet, she masterfully integrates beautiful calligraphic text into her pieces in a style reminiscent of legendary Mexican artist Nahui Olin. Below are some highlights of her remarks during our conversation, in which she discusses her process, poetry, and connection to Oaxaca. The exhibition will be open until June 20, 2018. Don’t miss it! 

The palette I use almost always is very Mexican, sometimes I use La Talavera or textiles, that’s why I love Oaxaca, because of the colors, the pigments. When I see the Oaxacan sky, I understand the paintings of the great Oaxacan artists. All the works are fantastic and dreamlike, hence the name of the exhibition.This work is very different from a paper mache technique, it is dreamlike because it is based on a poem that I wrote about the dream. Here you can see in detail that everything above is written as a hyper-graph and what it says is:

“The memory, the only silence that is, the memory, the only impossible dream, the dream, the last memory where we will be together, love.”

To learn more about Elisa and her work, check out her website , as well as her Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts.