Miriam Salado

Nature is untamed and the desert is one of its most resounding manifestations. Under the shade of a biznaga or a pitayo, the Gila Monster and the Giant Scorpion await; among the dry branches of an ocotillo, the Coral Snake and the Rattlesnake crawl. Equipped with claws, fangs, beaks, stingers, antlers, hyper-sensitive hearing and eyes, the desert animals coexist according to the same coexist according to the same elemental, primitive and wild impulse. The same is true of the vegetation, endowed with the vegetation, endowed with thorns, bark and pigments, its arid composition exposes the economy of its existence; the nature of the desert is instinctive and plain. The horizon, although sinuous, is an arrow; and all that is under the sky is under the sky is rugged (and averse to ornament and narrative). Nothing exists with excess, nor does it hide any double meaning. And yet, everything is present in an overwhelming present, from poison to silence.

Art, on the other hand, is brutal. The artist stalks or is in search of what has never been seen; even marveling at what he observes, something else intrigues him; not content with what he witnesses, he invents new bodies, rapturous and irrational. Each line drawn on paper violates the natural course of things; and when he names a work of his, he founds another world just as extraordinary. The desires of creation and destruction coexist indistinctly at the center of artistic endeavor. An inordinate appetite determines the character of the artist and his practice; insatiable, the artist goes out to meet unusual forms and what was standing upright is turned upside down; what were once two alien presences now become close, merge and claim a space of their own. The alloy of that formless mass that recalls a sting, a barbed wire, a stalk of thorns or an American fist, is not only of brass and gold, but also of metaphors and neologisms. The artist's vision is a double vision, alternating (and altering) reality. 

Based on this idea, N.A.S.A.L. presents Bestial, a solo show by artist Miriam Salado (Hermosillo, Sonora, 1987). Continuing her exploration of the Mexican desert, on this occasion we turn to the confrontation between the wild impulse of nature and the destructive impulse of human beings. The result is an imaginary landscape where animal and plant life coexist with the artificial design of weaponry. Through a series of drawings on paper and metal sculptures, Salado has created a collection of wild weapons where the instinct for survival and the desire for annihilation coincide equally.

The desert that incites Miriam Salado is simple in its grandeur, like the agate eye of a reptile; her work, on the other hand, is obsessive and severe, like a drug that takes by storm whatever it desires.

— Christian Barragán