Snacks And The City at Gotham Chelsea

​Gotham Chelsea presents Snacks and the City, a solo exhibition by Elizabeth Saloka featuring 70 hand-painted rock sculptures that explore our relationship to food as both conditioned consumers and emotionally complex individuals. On view from March 19 through May 3, the exhibition marks Saloka’s largest exhibition to date.

​Saloka’s practice begins with careful selection of rocks or rubble, observing shape, scale, and surface before determining what it is “supposed to be”. The works function as artifacts of consumption, reflecting the Pavlovian dimensions of what we eat and crave and how we self-soothe.

​Adopted from South Korea and raised in Minnesota, Saloka relocated to New York as an adult. Following the end of a decades-long relationship and a period of personal and professional upheaval, she encountered a rock in New Jersey that resembled a 2000s Nokia cellphone. She painted it. That moment marked the beginning of what she calls “rock fever”. 

​For Saloka, the material is central: “Growing up I always enjoyed art. I was constantly drawing and painting and crafting. The act of creating was fun. But the high cost of art supplies was prohibitive. Also, I would often make art on materials that were delicate, such as doodles on paper. So I was always accidentally tearing or wrecking my work. When I stumbled into rocks as an art material, it felt like everything opened up. Rocks are everywhere at low or no cost, and they're sturdy.

​When I first got into rock painting, I was at rock bottom personally and professionally. Painting rocks was my mental escape. I am so grateful to have found a path that I love and that has brought me so much satisfaction.”

​Presented at Gotham Chelsea, the abundance of snacks carry a subtle wink toward heightened appetites. Yet these works resist immediacy. Craving is slowed, fixed in stone, and made visible.

​Snacks in the City invites viewers to consider how food functions as comfort, identity, habit, and escape, and how even the most ordinary object can carry the weight of personal history.