Salt Pillars

Join us for “Salt Pillars,” an exhibition featuring Andrés Mario de Varona, Michael Petry, Eric Cousineau, and Morgan Barnard, extended until February 10, 2024.

Salt Pillars is a group exhibition of photographs and sculptures by Eric Cousineau, Andrés Mario de Varona, Morgan Barnard and Michael Petry. The show features six series, each with a central motif that serves as a surreal container for human experience. Televisions, motel rooms, light boxes, glass forms and a makeshift photography studio become vessels for grief, anger, intimacy and growth.

The show’s title references the Bible story of Idit, reductively referred to as Lot’s wife in the book of Genesis. God transforms Idit into a pillar of salt when she’s forced to flee the collapsing city of Sodom and longingly glances back. A modern touchpoint is Shirley Jackson’s 1948 short story “Pillar of Salt,” in which a New York tourist watches the city distintegrate around its oblivious inhabitants.

“Salt Pillars defiantly asserts the wisdom of looking back, despite the risk of devastation or even desolation,” says Gallery Director Jordan Eddy. “Its imagery often abstracts the human figure or peripherally explores human presence, tracing the salty residue of sweat and tears that we leave on the world and each other.”