The Beauty in Death | Performance Artist Edwin Salas

Watch any of his performances or study his visual art, the easy takeaway on Edwin Salas is he's one disturbed artist. And how could he not be?

When I profiled him in 2019 for Asheville's public radio station, he told me about the rape he suffered 30 years earlier and about the murder of his mother when he was just 5 years old. Indeed, much of his creativity blooms from what he labels his “dark happy place” and is directly shaped by those traumas.

The Asheville Fringe Festival is just around the corner, and Edwin Salas is about as Fringe as it gets in Asheville. He’s presenting his twisted version of “Hansel & Gretel” in two performances of puppetry, with dolls he carved himself.

We’ll talk about why he never shields his audiences from death, even in his works for children. We’ll get into his recent artistic explorations through virtual reality programming and Edwin’s insistence that, despite his art, he’s far from a scary person.