Sloat Shaw teaching eager students during her residency in Vietnam
Hidden Worlds
There are worlds within worlds hidden just out of sight in the brain. Neuroscientists locate these areas with scientific instruments. I use a far simpler technique to find them, lucid dreaming. Like Hilma af Klimt, I am interested in diving deep into the mystical planes in order to paint what I discover there.
The paintings form slowly, and continually move and change as each new layer settles on top of the previous layer. It’s as if I am mimicking the earth itself as I work, using paint made from the minerals in soil, opening the painting when I stitch and shred it to allow air in, sliding liquid medium across the surface of the canvas. I feel multiple forces of earth, air, and water come together on the painting.
As I work, I move between worlds that I see with my inner eye, and the effects of accelerated climate change on the land. The world bubbles with heat as weather patterns shift. The rising temperature is reflected in society as well, as the very structures that once seemed so stable and reliable crack apart.
The earth is a mirror for change, continually forming and re-forming, in a greatly accelerated process of destruction and creation.
I paint the earth as the living being it is.
2022 LBIF Show
Esther Adler, MOMA curator
Sandpiper review, April 20, 2022
Rise and Shine: Near the front entrance is Sloat Shaw's Unique stone lithograph and monoprint, 'Dawn Reaching Up to Start the Day.' In a chat with Whitlock, Shaw said making art is about creating a language and using an artistic voice.
The 24th annual National Juried Competition: Works on Paper, at the Long Beach Island Foundation of the Arts and Sciences in Loveladies N.J. is a playground for the imagination, filled with sumptuous shapes and textures, abstract and representational.
Seventy one works were selected from over a thousand submissions from across the United States. Juror Ester Adler is curator in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the Museum of Modern Art.
About the jury process for the Exhibition, Adler said, "I found myself looking for beauty in these submissions, not simply on an aesthetic level, but rather in the shared commitment to the creation of art as a way for artists to understand and shape the world. I was not disappointed."
If the juror's choices collectively make a statement, the individual artworks. are the punctuation.
Drawings and paintings on paper, hand-pulled prints, collages, photographs, digital works and paper constructions are thin slices of the human experience. Most are behind glass; some are unframed, exposed, highlighting the substrate's fragility. Paper, like people, is temporary. The print catalog of the full exhibition will be available April 25, 2022.
Sandpaper review by Victoria Ford April 20, 2022 r
Publications
May 2009
Interview with Alan Steinfeld, New Realities BBS radio.com.
September 2003
Interview, The Smoki Bacon Show, Boston Cable Network.
January 2008
Interview, VT4 Television, Hanoi, Vietnam.
March 4, 2002
Interview, Jeff Ferrannini, Boston Cable Network.
September 2007
Ouida Touchon Art Talk, The Las Cruces Bulletin.
December 1999
Earth Memories at the Millennium by Elizabeth Duvivier.