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Artist of the Year: Susanne Slavick
Slavick will present paintings and works on paper from her ongoing “R&R&R,” a series that converts our military expression for “rest and recuperation” to words like “reveal, regret, restore.” By digitally and manually transforming photographic images of wreckage, she “recognizes, rues or reconstitutes” what has been decimated. With hand-painted elements and motifs from the very cultures under attack, she begins to supplant what has been lost while reminding us of what is still being eradicated.
For Slavick, the generative force behind all creative enterprise embodies hope, so references to the art and architecture of the invaded join other measures of remorse and restitution. The functional becomes ornamental. Concrete and asphalt become fluid. Flora and fauna grace the ruins and rubble becomes renewed — gestures at undoing the damage.
She does not claim that her “restorations” offer any actual balm, but hopes that her work questions our complicity in, as well as our seemingly miraculous recovery from incomprehensible, self-inflicted destruction. Rainer Maria Rilke wrote: beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror. She thinks of this complicated “terror” as arising from the revelations that art offers, from the anxiety of creation itself, from our own self-delusion and recognition..
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