Soledad Salamé: Camouflage
April 12- May 22, 2025 at Goya Contemporary Gallery, Baltimore, MD
Oct 4, 2025- March 15, 2025 at Blaffer Art Museum, Houston, TX
Baltimore Reception: April 17 from 5-7pm
Curators involved with this exhibition: Laura Augusta, Blaffer Art Museum; Steven Matijcio, Knox Art Museum; Amy Raehse, Goya Contemporary Gallery
For Immediate Release
[Baltimore, MD] Goya Contemporary Gallery is pleased to present Soledad Salamé: Camouflage, a traveling exhibition on view at Goya Contemporary Gallery, Baltimore, MD from April 12- May 22, 2025, with a Reception on April 17, 5-7pm, and on view at Blaffer Art Museum, Houston, TX from Oct 4, 2025- March 15, 2026.
As environmental degradation becomes an increasingly pervasive and subtle part of our daily lives, its impact continues to be overshadowed by the promises of “green” consumerism. While major corporations tout their eco-friendly initiatives, the exploitation of natural resources persists unchecked. Global summits and regulations continue to struggle for meaningful change, and the spectacle of eco-activists disrupting art institutions seems more like a symbolic gesture than an effective solution. It is within this complex and urgent context that Chilean American artist Soledad Salamé positions her latest work—a profound, poetic intervention at the intersection of art, research, and environmental activism.
Salamé’s work highlights the quiet but powerful resilience of nature in the face of human influence. She collaborates with scientists, ecologists, and environmentalists to create works that are not only visual reflections, but also repositories of labor, resistance, and hope. Through this collaboration, she captures the often invisible or overlooked effects of environmental violence, while also exploring moments of healing and repair.
A core focus of Salamé’s practice has been her repeated engagement with the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, a region severely impacted by pollution and the mass disposal of textile waste—particularly fast fashion. Millions of pounds of discarded clothing are buried in the desert’s arid landscape, where they have become an unnerving, permanent feature of the terrain. This ecological wound, a direct result of unsustainable consumerism, serves as the backdrop for Salamé’s latest work.
Goya Contemporary Director Amy Raehse explains: “In Camouflage, Salamé transforms aerial drone photographs documenting the polluted Chilean landscape, where the waste-strewn terrain mirrors a complex camouflage of mountains and desert. These source images are reimagined and rendered through a variety of media, including canvas, embroidery, printmaking, paper pulp, sculpture, and layering techniques. With needle and thread, Salamé painstakingly traces the patterns of discarded textiles that now mar the desert’s surface, turning the act of sewing into both an elegy for the land and a quiet yet powerful form of resistance. This labor-intensive, delicate embroidery becomes a gesture of repair—an attempt to "re-thread" the fabric of our planet, creating a visual reconciliation between humanity’s destructive interventions and nature’s enduring resilience.” She continues: “At the same time, this delicate embroidery draws the eye to the very elements that comprise this mountain of waste: primarily, discarded clothing—relics of society’s obsession with fast fashion. Through her meticulous stitching, Salamé highlights the garments that have been discarded and abandoned, offering a poignant visual commentary on the fleeting nature of consumption and the ecological footprint left in its wake. Each stitch becomes a reflection on the disposability of modern culture and the stark consequences it leaves behind.”
An essay by Dr. Lowery Stokes Sims will accompany this exhibition. In her essay Stokes-Sims says: “We are bombarded daily with news about the unquenchable thirst for natural resources on the part of industry and technology concerns that is devastating any number of landscapes globally. Local communities world-wide are dealing with water deficits and scarcity. Airplanes are dealing with stronger than usual air currents, and incidents of intense brushfires, floods and tornadoes proliferate where they have not before. It is artists such as Soledad Salamé who bring these concerns to us through their work. If there is any question whether art could impact the thinking about the conditions with which humans are coping today, then one need only to focus on Salamé’s chronicling of the use of a pristine locale such as the Atacama Desert to have a visceral reaction that spurs an impulse to action.”
In Camouflage, Salamé also incorporates a more tactile, yet equally profound, material response to the desert’s ecological crisis: dresses fashioned from paper pulp created from recycled materials, bioplastics, or cotton created from pineapple fibers. These dresses are not just clothing but symbols of renewal—aspirational acts of re-populating the distressed panorama, echoing the artist's desire to create meaningful dialogue between humanity’s past mistakes and future possibilities. In these humble yet potent garments, the artist’s hands embody a quiet resistance against the relentless consumption and waste that has come to define the modern era.
This exhibition also includes works from Salamé’s ongoing projects in other locations, further demonstrating her commitment to understanding and engaging with the complex ways in which human activity reshapes the environment. From Chile’s Atacama Desert to widespread locales, Salamé’s practice spans time and geography, but remains grounded in a common thread of tender reflection, environmental urgency, and the belief that art can be both an expression and an agent of change. Salamé not only confronts the weight of environmental destruction but also offers a glimpse of hope—a visual language that calls for healing, reinvention, and the possibility of a more sustainable future.
About the artist:
Soledad Salamé (b. 1954, Santiago, Chile) is an award-winning, critically acclaimed interdisciplinary artist based in Baltimore, MD. Her work, grounded in extensive field research across the Americas and Antarctica, addresses themes of migration, climate change, and the socio-political impacts of environmental shifts. Represented by Goya Contemporary Gallery, Salamé's pieces are housed in numerous private, public, and Museum collections worldwide, including the National Gallery of Art (DC), National Museum of Women in the Arts (DC), Baltimore Museum of Art.
Salamé earned a BA from Santiago College, Chile (1972), and studied at Cegra, Caracas, Venezuela (1979). Her time in Venezuela exposed her to the rainforest, a pivotal influence on her work. After moving to Washington, DC in 1983, she established a studio in Baltimore. Notable exhibitions include those at the Contemporary Museum (Baltimore), Museum of Fine Arts (Santiago), El Museo del Barrio (NYC), and the Milwaukee Art Museum.
Salamé’s projects, such as "We The Migrants: Fleeing/Flooding" (2019) and "The Women’s March" (2017), reflect her ongoing investigation into environmental and human rights issues.
FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT the exhibition’s curator:
Amy Eva Raehse, Executive Director & Partner at Goya Contemporary Gallery P: 410-366-2001 /amy@goyacontemporary.com
Goya Contemporary is free and open to the public.
Hours of operation: Tue – Fri, 10am – 6pm / Saturday, noon-4pm & by appointment.
About Goya Contemporary: Goya Contemporary Gallery promotes the art and culture of our time by presenting ideas through exhibitions, curatorial practice, catalogues, print publishing, artist representation, and collection development. The gallery builds private & public collections, assists in acquisitions, and facilitates auction activity. Goya Contemporary has earned international acclaim for thought-provoking exhibitions, innovative programming, and unique collaborations with artists. Known as one of the most prestigious and long running galleries in the mid-Atlantic, Goya is dedicated to scholarly programming and promoting the work of mid-career artists both internationally and locally.
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