Gerald Slota: Story

Smile. Fake accident. Crossing Guard. RUN. Legs cut off. Basement. To bad. I hate your guts.

These scrawls are just a hint of the disturbing words and musings, rants and warnings, that come wielding at us sharp as a knife in Gerald Slota’s current exhibition and in the early pages of the book by the same name, “Story” (SF Camerawork, 2012)*.

In Slota’s current photo exhibition, Story, Ricco/Maresca Gallery presents a look at the artist’s oeuvre spanning nearly twenty years that will likely leave the viewer not only wondering about a disturbing visual past, but also asking the much deeper question: What in the name of hell will possibly happen next?

Good art—just as a good story—prods and pokes and hammers into that part of us, that which we may not wish to face or see, touch or know. Yet, somehow, Slota manages to convince us and entice us into this hallucinatory kingdom that is born of a calculated chaos… much in the way the sociopath masters the art of seduction, luring one into a world of the unspeakable. The world of no going back.

Yet: our human imagination so yearns to fill in these quick snaps of arrested narrative, we so yearn for meaning in even the most obviously chaotic setting, Gerald Slota’s art is finally a collaborative art with his viewers, like the work of such surrealist artists as Man Ray, Lee Miller, Max Ernst, and our American collage-master of dollhouse-sized mysteries, Joseph Cornell. Slota’s art resists even as it teases us with the possibility of a coherent narrative; like a mirage ever retreating to the horizon, such art is tantalizing and elusive.

– Joyce Carol Oates
“The Surreal Art of Gerald Slota”
Story 2012

Like a sculpture in bricolage, Slota conveys this complex statement by combining the jetsam of our times with the passionate and intuitive marks and gestures of his hand.

– Alison Nordström, PhD
Exhibition Curator
Found 2006

Don’t venture far from shore. Keep an eye out for what’s moving just beneath you. Remember that it’s all only a dream and that everything will probably be absolutely fine in the end.

Probably.

– Neil LaBute
“Because the Darkness Feeds My Soul,” Aperture 2010