Juko Gallery Current Online Exhibition

David Slater’s artworks draw upon the American popular culture he grew up with, his travels and work experiences, advertising, circuses, peep shows, pirates, and more. Unlike the European Symbolists, who looked to Roman and Greek mythology for source material, Slater’s artistic vision is borne out of the unique American experience that exploded with color and vibrancy after WWII. Hollywood, advertising, sex, and television repainted America in bold hues. Slater’s work incorporates these influences resynthesizes them and results in his own, unique visual poetry. Canvases are rendered with primal saturated colors, bold outlines, and collage cutout objets that he discovers along his journeys. Slater’s work is simultaneously autobiographical, mystical, and infused with dreams. His long career as a painter in Sag Harbor, New York is well known. His stylistic visual language is easily discernible and unique. Exploring themes reflecting surroundings, passing encounters, desires, and social phenomena, his canvases are layered with multiple meanings and stories. Each canvas is embedded with curios of time, space, desires. Slater explores the beauty of women in many different contexts and themes but there is no objectification or sexualization of the women’s body. Additionally, the artist fills his canvasses with writings, geometric figures, and other symbols reflecting his experiences or social commentary which gave rise to the particular artwork. Slater explores desire as joy, as can be seen in his beach scenes filled with women sun bathing, walking, or playing. They remind us that passion, desire, and sunshine all hold hands. Slater’s work is not for children but it appeals to the child in each of us, as it often mirrors the patchwork of memories as we experience our own, simple, and complicated at the same time; songs of innocence and experience.