john slepian

My work of the last twenty years can be best described as presenting dilemmas to the viewer. It has been more about asking questions than providing answers. I've been particularly interested in looking at how meaning is constructed in our experience of works of art, and how technology and media can be used to make that process visible. For each of my works I've looked to develop a concept, a formal approach, and a technological solution that complement each other. Throughout my various bodies of work, I've asked a lot of questions: What does it take to cause us to experience empathy with the object of our gaze, even if it clearly isn't real? How can technological artifacts cause us think about “nature” as a cultural construct? What happens to a work of formalist art when the rules of Modernism are broken? Is art an activity, an idea, an object, or all of these? Can an artist's own internal experience be made to be meaningful to others by making it visible with technology? And most recently in my photographic work: How does an image of something change the way we see it? Admittedly these questions are very different, but what they all ultimately ask is: How do we come to understand our world? And how does art help us to do that?