Staff Report
The Wildling Museum in Solvang will open the exhibit “Folded Art: Origami Animals by Robert Salazar” this month. It features origami representations of creatures found in Santa Barbara County such as the yellow-billed magpie, steelhead trout, California condor, and tarantula.
The opening reception will be from 3 to 5 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 10, and the exhibit will be on view from Nov. 10 to March 25 in the second-floor Valley Oak Gallery. A selection of marine-based origami animals by Salazar also will be on display at the Santa Barbara Maritime Museum.
RSVP for the artist’s reception by emailing mitra@wildlingmuseum.org or calling 805-686-8315.
Salazar is a deployable structures contractor at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and is chief executive and technical officer at Orisun where he develops origami, inflatable, and tensegrity-inspired art and technology toward space exploration and environmental sustainability.
He has been designing and folding origami for 18 years, and his works range in size from a few millimeters to many meters across and can comprise thousands of folds.
At JPL, he designed the origami crease pattern for the Starshade’s optical shield and the large origami deployable solar reflectors for the Transformers for Lunar Extreme Environments project. This mission is a NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Study whose focus is to provide a near continuous supply of power inside the Shackleton Crater for powering a potential lunar base.
The Wildling Museum is open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays and from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekends (closed on Tuesdays).
For more information, visit www.wildlingmuseum.org.
