FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Cecilia Salama, The Butterfly Reprise
July 20th – July 30th, 2016 @ Arts+Leisure
Opening Reception: Thursday, July 20th 7 – 10pm

The Butterfly Reprise
Fantasy can ruin you
it ruined me
from childhood, loves invisible
the dream house
the set of towels with our names on them
the rug you picked up from a couple in New Hampshire that goes under our bed
I see at least one butterfly a day.
Constant reminders of,
Vomit on my breath
As I ride the train home alone
This year I fell in love with a gymnast I’ve never met.
I think it’s easier this way, she’s most likely underage. I grab her forcefully
on the screen
and watch her face distort as she twirls and tumbles
We kept butterflies at my school when I was little. They bled in their cocoons. They
borrowed body heat from my hand before they took off.
This will never happen to us.
Arts + Leisure is pleased to present Cecilia Salama’s solo exhibition, The Butterfly Reprise, opening July 20th and running through July 30th, 2016. For Salama’s first project with Arts + Leisure, the artist will present a new body of work including a series of sculptures and video installation.
Constructed entirely of synthetic materials, the works included in The Butterfly Reprise function both as fully realized individual pieces and as a cohesive statement touching on a range of universal human experiences including fantasy, displaced desire, romance and delusion. In contrast with these ageold sentiments that have inspired artists throughout history, Salama’s work also hones in on the very contemporary dilemma of digital convenience creating a new kind of loneliness that no previous generation has grappled with. The Butterfly Reprise is rich with these simultaneous parallels and paradoxes: the back and forth between materiality and painterliness, the computer and the wall, and specifically the use of manufactured, mass produced materials to convey deeply personal, private, and unique experiences.
Perhaps the most prominent paradox set forth in this body of work is power vs. vulnerability, delineated through the reoccuring butterfly motif. In her process of melting, pouring and moulding plastics and rubber through the use of heat, a technique that is paradoxically both harsh and gentle, she leaves behind what could be seen as a ghostly remnant of her own body. In an essay on Salama’s work, critic Laura Warman writes, “There is a body behind the work. She is there. She is a she. She emerges from the latex. The pieces are formed through Cecilia’s body, releasing. She is in control, but she is not the center. She pours and swirls the materials, they come in contact with her body and are released…” Much in the same way, Salama recalls a butterfly absorbing heat from her hand in the poem above from which The Butterfly Reprise takes it’s title.
In her video piece Together Again, Salama shifts her focus to a pubescent female gymnast, who acts as a vessel for further examination of the push and pull of power versus vulnerability, a common thread throughout this body of work. The footage of the young girl, spliced into and over images of synthetic pastel amalgamations, can be seen as blatant objectification and appropriation of childhood, but when viewed through a different lens may be seen as a reclamation of the teenage girl, as Warman writes, “centering and desexualization of bodily power… This is the teenage girl if we allow ourselves to value her.” Cecilia Salama has presented her work in several solo exhibitions at venues including Art Baby Gallery, The Java Project, and Rice University, in addition to numerous group shows at venues including Regina Rex, Greenpoint Terminal Gallery, Good Work Gallery, Transfer Gallery, Anna Jill Lüpertz Gallery, and SoHo House. She received her BA from Brown University. She lives and works in New York, NY.