Rita Salt
Skeleton Key

October 10 - November 9, 2024

48 Ludlow St. New York, NY, 10002

Entrance is pleased to present Skeleton Key, a solo presentation of recent ceramic works by Rita Salt opening on October 10, 2024. The exhibition comprises tiled mosaic portraits and scenes as well as other ceramic creations, serving as some of Salt’s largest wall-mounted works in the medium to date. The artist’s wall sculptures employ motifs familiar to those acquainted with her work. Playfully rendered medieval castles, religious iconography, mythical creatures, and fairytale imagery populate her surfaces and floor sculptures. 

Salt’s tiled wall pieces take different forms, at times conjuring illustrative pages from illuminated manuscripts – as is the case with J’ai Descendu Dans Mon Jardin (2024) – wherein a distorted nude figure tinged in green descends from the sky, reaching into the jagged stalks of grass at the foreground. Hell’s Dining Room (2024), octagonal in shape and painterly in its depiction of figures on the artwork’s face, could very well be a scene from Dante Alighieri’s Inferno. Ghoulish faces peer out from the frame, grins pulled taut and hands in prayer position, as if the viewer has caught the clan in the midst of saying grace. A flurry of wings cram together to allow everyone a seat at the table; the perspective and densely filled surface create a sense of claustrophobia and lack of personal space, even as the characters in Hell’s Dining Room appear to be gleefully enjoying themselves. In this piece and in others throughout Skeleton Key, artists such as David Rappeneau come to mind; Salt and Rappeneau share a proclivity for producing spindly, angular bodies and faces in surrealist settings that evoke the graphic novel and fantasy canon. 

Other works, such as good morning, underworld, and star catcher (all 2023), feature diminutive castles complete with turrets, steeples, and cartoon-like brick and stone facades, each housing a bordered central image corresponding to its title. Salt’s fascination with castles – structures that historically could either protect and fortify or, conversely, trap and confine – emerged at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic when she found herself stuck in New Zealand due to lockdown rules. Now based in Pawtucket, RI, her exploration of the castle motif remains prevalent throughout the exhibition.  

In addition to the various sculptures adorning the exhibition space, a tile installation wraps around two of the gallery walls, mimicking how tiles are customarily employed. Salt is invested in public art, and while making her own site-specific work, she ruminated on tile installations and commissions in public transportation centers, playgrounds, and other indoor and outdoor spaces accessible to all. The tiles in this installation have roots in the Moravian tradition of Henry Chapman Mercer (1856-1930), an archaeologist, leading ceramicist of the American Arts and Crafts movement, and founder of The Moravian Pottery and Tile Works – itself built in the style of a medieval-looking castle. 

Rita Salt’s Skeleton Key is on view through November 2024.

-Julia Birka-White

Rita Salt (b. 1995) lives and works between Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and Brooklyn, New York. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY and has participated in residencies in Germany, Italy, and Iceland. Drawing from the wells of childhood imagination, Salt’s ceramic sculptures and paintings interlace the fantastical with the tangible, creating mesmerizing works that are at once instinctively playful and formally measured. Salt weaves together elements of folklore to conjure rich narratives that traverse realms of light and dark. Imagery of angels, portals to hell and heaven, and whimsical creatures, reflects the duality of childhood—a blend of wonder and terror. Issuing from fascination with the history of public mosaic installations, Salt’s latest work on ceramic reveals an interplay of innocence with the uncanny, heightened through her use of vibrant glazes and a compulsively expressive hand. Salt’s work has been exhibited at Raking Light Gallery, Los Angeles; Monster Valley, Tāmaki Makaurau; and Lubov, New York, among others.