“Under the Sunbeams” will be my 51st solo exhibition since 1999 and first in LA in 12
years.
When I was a sci-fi child in San Francisco in the late 70s, I obsessively drew “starship
battles.”
In undergrad at UCLA in 1996, I tried to capture the spirit of my childhood drawings
in paintings, but I wasn’t able to do so successfully.
In 2012, I began to study western astrology. I had a light bulb moment when I realized
that the charts and planetary symbols I was reading looked very similar to my
childhood “starship battles.”
At a residency in Mallorca in 2015 I took this breakthrough and attempted again to
turn the intuition of my childhood into beautiful work. No such luck.
I often find that when making my work if I just turn the angles a few degrees, and
change my perspective, the work will start to speak to me and I can unlock the block.
So it was in 2018 after some 40 years that this current series – entitled D8S – finally
came to fruition in the “diamond compass format” in my studio in Berlin, and these
energetic paintings are now ready to be exhibited for the first time.
D8S are acrylic paintings in a rotated square format with side lengths of either 83,
117, or 144 (cm) which play off the geometrics of astrological charts from chosen
moments in time inspired by birthdates, founding fathers, origin stories pulled from
the past and future.
In dialogue with the the Today series of On Kawara — D8S manifest, record and
transform the invisibility of time into a full range of the electromagnetic spectrum of
visible light — vibrant shapes, lines and color patterns depicted on the matrix of a
stretched canvas.
These are joyful paintings, a way to celebrate the mysteries of life.
there-there will also present the recent publication SUNDOOR, 2019 (144 pages,
published by Kerber Verlag). It is a mystical work about spiritual ascension, and in the
words of John Major Jenkins, the “journey up through the planetary spheres of the
ecliptic to the door of the Most High, the Sol Invictus, the Eighth Gate, the realm of
the Hypercosmic Sun.”
Sat Nam
Slater
(LA, 2019)
