Salim Green: Taileater

François Ghebaly is proud to present Taileater, Salim Green’s debut exhibition with the gallery.

The exhibition begins with reorientation. Viewers enter the space through what is traditionally the side door of the gallery to find themselves caught behind the projection of the exhibition’s eponymously titled single-channel video. Shifty, a surrogate of the artist, is the protagonist of the video and moves through a digitally-rendered hybrid urban landscape avoiding surveillance, running, hiding, training, preparing, and scrolling on his phone. Though Shifty remains vigilant, the object (or hyper-object) of his anxiety is never visualized for us. The character circles, loops, and attempts to evade a future event that has yet to take shape. The footage itself alternates from CGI to Super 8 film, shifting from an illustrated world to depictions of a “real” one. This interface gives Shifty a life that extends beyond the digital and merges with our sunlit world away from the keyboard.  

The sculptural objects in Taileater offer a way to think about Shifty materially, bringing elements from his space into ours, off the screen and physically into the gallery space. The sculptures mirror Shifty’s elusiveness in form but wield their agency spatially, redirecting and deflecting viewers as they navigate the exhibition. Like previous series by Green, the hanger works in the exhibition are “sculptures that can defend themselves.” They interact with Shifty’s belongings (a bat, a plastic cover, a uniform, and tin foil hats to protect from radiation) and imply new and imagined survival strategies through their configuration. 

In his practice, Green often delineates things by working around them—locating the edges of an image, object, or idea, and building from there. His paintings abstract elements at the periphery of environments. Textures, weathering, degradation, reflections, refractions, etcetera found on the margins create the foundation for these new works. Green merges and collapses imagery in a manner that tightens the boundaries of various referents until they are freed from legibility. This opens the images, creating possibilities for them to become something else. He paints on felted wool mounted to wooden panels, which further blends the images and reinscribes a kind of intimacy in the variability of surface. The felt itself resists accuracy in depiction; as the artist explains, “I always said I needed a surface to fight against.” 

Green remains interested in the resultant abstraction less as a matter of style and more as one of methodology. The artist’s latest body of work approaches abstraction by drawing on ongoing experiments with obfuscation. In previous figurative paintings and portraiture, Green looked to actively anonymize his sitters by blurring their facial features to protect their privacy. By turning to modified environmental imagery that omits or negates the subject altogether, the artist’s engagement with concealment has broadened into more complex definitions of the term. As much as Taileater obscures it also reveals, proposing rabbit holes that might lead us back to where we started, perhaps better prepared from the process. 

Exhibition text by Benjamin Chaffee 

Salim Green (b. 1996, Middletown, CT) earned a BA from Wesleyan University in 2020 and an MFA from the University of California Los Angeles in 2024. Green’s work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at Société, Berlin; Josh Lilley, London; François Ghebaly, Los Angeles; Room 3557, Los Angeles; SculptureCenter, New York; Bellyman, Los Angeles; Stony Island Arts Bank, Chicago; Fábrica, Mexico City. His work is included in the collections of the Getty Research Institute, The Kinsey Collection and the Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University. He lives and works between Los Angeles, CA and Middletown, CT, where he is currently the Sullivan Fellow in Art at Wesleyan University.