BmoreArt

The conceptual armature of Salamé’s project is discernible in the middle gallery: fast fashion’s detritus as landscape and ecological riddle explored through what she stated as her frames: the ocean, the desert, and the rainforest. Dresses created from bioplastics are draped with an eye for silhouettes. Unframed prints extend beyond their edges into infinity.

Take in the color palette with its echoes of sand, trees, roots, earth, and sky, and then consider the visibility and ubiquity of fast fashion and its color wheel. How about its variety of textures? Or the materials that ensure the volume and speed of its fabrication? Camouflage as a poetic conceit takes on literal weight in the images on display. 

“Fast Fashion Atacama I, II, III, IV,” is a quartet of archival prints on canvas, depicting a once pristine terrain of red sand now hidden beneath a patchwork of placid colors typical of a modern closet or the innards of an H&M store.

The flattened scene is a 2-dimensional photograph of the Atacama Desert given a haunting, tactile presence through hand sewn embroidery etching the outlines of clothes that were once lived in. The embroidery not only adds texture to the image—as we look closely, it also brings us into a communal space with the artist and her collaborators whose hands and labor animate the print, like Rachel Czarnik who worked with Salamé on the embroidery and Jacob Marrero who assisted with printmaking and the fabrication of the rainforest dress.

There is a mimetic mode in this collection that informs the curation by Amy Eva Raehse, as well as the art itself. Divided into three galleries, each room repeats Salamé’s thematic foci—ocean, desert, and rainforest. The images recur with variations in tone and tint and the mediums serve as mirrors of the ecological riddle—see “A Mountain of Clothes in Blue,” “Fast Fashion in Black and Brown,” and “Fast Fashion in Color I.” And yet each piece offers its own response.

“Blue and Yellow Algae,” a silkscreen produced on Rives BFK paper, is luminous and richly lit from within. Salamé has reflected nature back to us as precious and refined. How will we transform and be transformed by what we are invited to behold?

“Ocean,” a dress created with bioplastics mimes the colors of the rainforest, the transparency of clear water, and the sheen of bioplastic. Its surface shine harkens to the richness of silk, and like a placid lake, reflects the vegetation of the basin or plant life above it. But it is also dappled with organic and possibly inorganic pigmentation, particularly in the orange woven through the crocheted belt. We are reminded here of art’s debt to industrial materials which suggests that art itself, like our own bodies, are already infused with the synthetic and indestructible products of the Anthropocene. 

Inorganic plastic is not just a ubiquitous and versatile product which is made into clothes and airplanes and medical technology. Marine life feed on it and it can be found in a new mother’s milk ducts. But as Salamé demonstrates, plasticity is also a quality, amenable to ingenuous and local production from natural and organic materials. The bioplastic used in “Ocean” was cooked in the artist’s kitchen, with generous assistance from Maia Malakoff.

Beauty is a deeply embedded imperative here, a surfeit of pleasure for the eye that belies the near horror in miles of garbage in the earth’s oceans, deserts and rainforests. Like Salamé’s mylar prints of Venice which captured its vulnerability to rising sea levels, Camouflage renders beauty and material repurposing from the catastrophes of environmental degradation. The beauty here is not empty or slight, but deeply ethical, a slow product of intense labor and years of study and gestation. 

“Rainforest,” a light-yellow vest of cotton woven from pineapple husks offers exquisite innovation and style with intimations of classical sculpture and poise. Placed alongside “Desert,” a ruched, floor length dress made from handmade flax paper and clay, humanity’s sartorial future was for me suddenly yoked to the past, when recycling was not an attempt to salvage our wanton and wasteful use of resources but a natural cycle of resourceful consumption, with our connection to nature intact, an awareness of our own creatureliness secure in our responsibility as stewards of the earth’s resources, not its predators. Salamé’s collaborator on the desert dress was Helen Frederick of Reading Road Studio.

A 12-piece photographic print bears the title of the exhibition, “Camouflage.” It is displayed in a gallery dominated by the aura and coral tint of the desert. Transformed from photographs by a labor intensive and iterative process through solar etching, silkscreen, and hand painting, its tiered landscape suggests red-brown earth, blue sky, and a neutral terrain. The artist adds a textured 3-dimensionality using sculptured shapes created by chine-collé and fine Japanese paper. 

Sit and do some “slow looking,” a term offered by the curator, Amy Eva Raehse. Inhabit the dresses in your mind’s eye. Engage your mimetic faculties. Salamé’s printed and bio-engineered textiles can be viewed as an offering—a curative, both for the earth itself and for us, the agents of its wounds and scars.

Like the innovators recycling the disposable clothes into yarn in the second part of the video, Fast Fashion Recycled, Salamé’s practice is an example of what is possible in the work of restoration, regeneration, and redemption. When it is done with Salamé’s collaborative ethos replete with models for how we might live differently, we are in the realm of the good, the common good.

Camouflage is on view April 12 through June 15, 2025 at Goya Contemporary.
Gallery Hours: Tues / Fri, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm and Saturdays, 12:00 pm – 4:00 pm

The exhibit will be on view at Blaffer Art Museum in Houston, TX October 4, 2025- March 15, 2026.