Salt Lick, Apr 28 - May 2, 2026
Concordia University, 1515 Rue Sainte-Catherine O, Montréal, QC
Materials: mineral salt licks, pine wood, nylon, video projection
Photography: Danika Zandboer
Exhibition Text by Amanda Zhang
Entering Salt Lick, you find yourself in an opening: a cave, a cavern, a gaping mouth—an invitation to an interiority that houses two tongues constructed around a central uvula sculpted from ground up salt-lick blocks designed for animal consumption. The dual composition pairs white fabric embroidered with the chemical decomposition of sodium chloride (salt) with red fabric dotted with salt-encrusted beads sewn into areas of the tongue with the highest concentration of taste buds. Miniature tongue-shaped sacraments made from the same ground salt-lick populate the corner shelf and podium.
Across Hodson’s practice, the erotic register of concealment is positioned in relation to the encounter with an edge, a threshold where meaning, sensation, and expectation converge. This edge is continuously negotiated, producing moments of both intimate encounter and estrangement. Even at the level of language—itself embedded in the tongue—meaning emerges through contact, proximity, and exposure, shaped by the under which it is produced and received.
In this exhibition, salt is imagined as a shapeshifter capable of melting, dissolving, and traversing porous boundaries. At once a familiar, everyday material, it is also inextricable from complex human systems, laden with metaphysical and poetic significance.
While researching salt mines in Salzburg, Austria, Hodson documented the use of religious shrines and altars within the mines—a testament both to salt’s close association with Catholicism and the role of religion in regimes of extraction.
Despite associations with purity and value across cultures, salt’s ubiquity in contemporary life renders its essential role largely invisible, taken for granted. By staging this moment of contact between salt and tongue, tongue and audience, Salt Lick foregrounds the omnipresence of salt across systems—within the human body, environmental ecosystems, and industrial processes—making its material and symbolic character perceptible. Salt becomes both medium and metaphor, circulating across regimes that are at once biological, environmental, and economic. The meeting of body and salt reorients our attention toward what is ordinarily imperceptible, making visible the edges and thresholds through which value and meaning are continuously formed and transformed.
Acknowledgements: Surabhi Ghosh (supervisor), Aaron McIntosh and Michelle Lacombe (panel)
Nahrain Yousefian (audio production), Gisèle Suzor-Morin (sewer), Brian Cooper, Joseph Hadish, Allison Higgins, Ted Hodson, Chris Latchem, Genevieve Moisan, Tom Simkins, Amanda Zhang (production, design, installation support), Maddie Alexander, Marius Gnanasihamany, and Marion Little (editing support), Anita Chastantet, Flo Evans, Gwynne Fulton, Hannah Guinan, Adrian Hall, Sammy Jamieson, Shauna Janssen, Xenia Laffely, Temple Marucci-Campbell, Aziza Nassih, maya rae oppenheimer, Michelle Pawloski, kay slauenwhite, Yuki Tam, Josh Vettivelu, Zimari Yumva, and so many more sweet frienda (studio visits, references, & moral support).
Locations: Montreal QC, Toronto Island ON, Halifax NS, Salzburg Aus.