Souther Salazar, artist and stapler collector

Originally published in Kitchen Sink magazine.

Souther Salazar’s work exists at the intersection of zines, comic books, and the gallery world with a four-way “GO!” sign at every corner. Embracing teenagers swoop through the air on jet packs, vertebras jut out from the elongated neck of a Song of the South crow, a geometric-headed sasquatch nun reminisces about the best night of its life to a fox without forelimbs and the gleeful driver of a swerving 1950’s milk truck with the rear hatch open strews bottles along the road. In his frenetic genre-busting exhibits, paintings on rectangular slabs of wood function like panels from a comic book; thick layers of collaged cardboard give them the depth of bas-relief and characters from zines reappear as sculptures. “All my life it’s been everything mixed together. I think most kids are that way. They don’t think about what their medium is. If they have Play-Doh out, they work with that. If they have crayons out they work with that, and for me it’s sort of the same feeling. I want it to have that same level of excitement every time I sit down to make something.”