Artist Lecture: Andy Slater
Wednesday, January 22, 2025 , 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm CST
Exhibiting artist Andy Slater will present a lecture on his artwork, followed by a brief reception. Refreshments will be provided.
Slater’s exhibition, Paintings & Sculptures, features Chicago-based artist Andy Slater’s sound works and three-dimensional objects that mimic the presentation and appearance of traditional artistic formats but engage senses other than vision. Meant to be touched or heard rather than seen, these “paintings and sculptures” trouble the ocularcentrism that is at the core of the “visual” arts. For Slater, who is blind, this is more than just a conceptual gesture or a political statement (though it is those things, too): it is an attempt to invite people to have artistic experiences that are analogous to his own.
Slater has observed that when institutions attempt to make their artworks accessible to visually impaired people, the alternatives they present frequently do a poor job of approximating the original works. Audio descriptions of paintings, for instance, often focus on descriptive terms or traits that are irrelevant to blind people. Handling either a scaled model of a sculpture or a hunk of the material it is made of hardly gets one halfway towards what it is like to look at it. The problem is not that a description is not a painting, or that a model is not a sculpture. Instead, the problem is that descriptions, models, and other accessible options are essentially new works of art that need to translate the original into a different sensory register. Museums and galleries seldom achieve this.
The works in Paintings & Sculptures are inspired by accessible alternatives and the ways they often fail. Slater has created alt-text descriptions and sculptural models that are their own originals, not translations of other visual artworks. His Invisible Ink series, which features heavily in this exhibition, comprises textual accounts of paintings that do not physically exist. Intended to be listened to rather than seen, these “paintings” encourage their audience to mentally construct images of “visual” objects that only exist as sound. Likewise, the proper way to engage the small bronzes which Slater presents alongside these sound works is not through the sense of sight, but rather touch. Meant to be handled and appreciated solely for their tactile complexity, these artworks broaden the notion of sculpture as either a visual or spatial medium by proposing the aesthetic significance of touch and touch alone.
Andy Slater: Paintings & Sculptures is the center point of multiple educational programs. Slater will give a public lecture and meet with students and classes at ISU. University Galleries is collaborating with the Wonsook Kim School of Art’s Visiting Artist Program for his public lecture and class visits. University Galleries’ staff will lead art-making workshops for ISU students, families, K-12 students, and community members. Free virtual and in-person curator-led tours are available by appointment for the duration of the exhibition.
Paintings & Sculptures is organized by Troy Sherman, curator at University Galleries. The exhibition and programming are supported by University Galleries’ grants from the Illinois Arts Council, the Harold K. Sage Foundation, and the Illinois State University Foundation Fund. Workshops and field trip reimbursements are supported by the Lori Baum and Aaron Henkelman University Galleries Community Fund.
