David Slovic

To read past interviews click on artist name below:

>Anderson, Neil
>Bentley, Allen
>Hargrove, Dana
>Lyon, Chris
>Oberst, Paul
>Rutstein, Rebecca
>Stojakovic, Ivan

Our current featured artist is David Slovic.
Below is an excerpt from an interview with Bridgette Mayer, Philadelphia, PA

BM: Can you talk about your progression from being a full-time architect to becoming a professional artist?

DS: I studied painting and sculpture at Cornell and Architecture at Penn. I had the privilege to work with Louis Kahn who is an architect that approached space and light with an artistic sensibility. Even as a practicing architect, I was consistently engaged in a dialogue with the art world and participated in exhibitions at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, PS1 Contemporary Art Center and the Venice Biennale. The exhibits included elaborate drawings, installations and collages. 
In the 1960s I began taking photographs of roadside “Americana”. Some of this work was in a book on diners. With other images I developed collages and photomontages which ultimately led me to taking abstract photographs of light. An architect is an artist of space and function so moving from sculptures big enough to live in to more two dimensional canvasses was, and still is, extremely challenging and intriguing to me.

BM:Talk a bit about the history of your art making.

DS: I always made drawings, collages and paintings while practicing architecture and for the last 18 years I have devoted my time to explore working with collages of photographic images as my primary material.

BM: How has your background in architecture shaped your work?

DS: I think structurally and my images are constructed from separate parts. The whole is seen and felt but the particular elements of making an image remain identifiable. The concern with composition, light, scale, surface etc. are also important in architecture with the exception that architecture serves a designated function, but message, perception and esthetic are part of the expression also.  It’s hard to separate the influences into neat compartments but I think the sense of working with light, space and structure which carry over from architecture are fundamentals.  

BM: How did you arrive at working with chromogenic prints in your work?

DS: I started taking abstract color photographs and turning them into studies for the paintings I was doing at the time. I sometimes put several of the photographs together to increase complexity. I realized that the original photographic pieces had more direct visual tension than the translations into paintings and I began to work only with the photographs themselves.  My first collages were just two or three photos, then perhaps ten or twelve and gradually as I learned how to work with the numerous individual prints I began making larger, more complicated pieces of up to 1000 photographs.  The prints are overlapped not cut so a finished piece can become thick which gives them a physical quality as well.

BM: Has the subject always been the same?

DS: The subject of the original photographs themselves is light.  Light, recorded using chemicals or now electronics, is the basis for all photography.  I isolate the image to achieve a portrait of light itself. The energy and physicality of the light gives the collages an inner luminosity.  This aspect of my work hasn’t changed even as explorations of how to use it continues to develop.  

BM: Do you see them as mixed media works or paintings?                                    

DS: I see them as mixed media informed by ideas and explorations that may have originated in the traditions of painting or sculpture but I also see them as minimalist assemblage of a specific unit used as a mark to form a larger image.

BM: How should a viewer approach your work?

DS: Looking from different distances and different angles, from afar and from close up, reveals the layers of the built up image and offers a multiplicity of views. 
The viewer discovers that there is only one element multiplied and combined to make the whole and also the physical presence of the dozens or hundreds of overlapped prints which ripple across the surface.  As the viewer moves, different perspectives offer new visual readings and the eye shifts from the scale of the unit to the scale and proportions of the entire piece. It’s a dynamic process.

BM: Where do you get your ideas visually?

DS: The work is a mix of intention and discovery.  I often start with a few prints of an intriguing image experimenting to find its strongest properties. I may use the image right away or it may sit until those qualities resonate with an idea.  The goals I begin with tend to warp and evolve as I work with the prints. The process evolves by building the image and studying it, then doing it again until the sense of movement and depth is achieved without trying to estheticize the result.

BM: How did your tape pieces come to fruition?

DS: Each collage piece goes through multiple iterations as it gets made, revised and refined. I developed a process of back taping the prints so that I can view them on the wall but still change their position. As I worked with the tape I noticed the light quality on the surface of the tape bits.  In sculptural groupings they have an empathetic quality, a sympathetic physicality. It’s as if you can touch them with your eyes. Like my photo collages they are accumulations with tense relationships between the whole and the myriad of separate but blending pieces.

BM: Do you see tapeworks as separate or as part of the other works?

DS: I see them as a related means to exploring issues raised in the collages especially polar dualities like chance/intention, whole/part, abstraction/image and flatness/depth.  But I respect their characteristics as being different than the photographs. The tapeworks have a compelling fragility as if they are holding together by sheer will power. Their curves and surfaces capture light and shadow and have a reflective glow. 

BM: What ideas evolved as you worked on this current series?

DS: The work in HIGH LIGHT RHYTHM comes out of challenges I have given myself.  The small pieces, UMBRIA, DESERT, for example come from a “monochrome” series where each piece comments on the notion of the monochrome and each uses only 50 images.  In the pieces WHISPER and CLOUDBURST I am working more with multiple print images and colors.  SHIVA and QUAKE display more sense of movement and force.  The collages have the ability to convey an emotional abstraction, presence and depth.  Light is the key.

BM: Where do you see the work going in the future?

DS: It’s always hard to predict new directions but I am intrigued by the KALEIDOSCOPE installation contrasting the photo collages with the tape-works and controlling more precisely what the viewer sees. I want to explore new disjunctions, similarities and differences creating meaningful tensions through abstraction.