Joey Slaughter earned his BFA from Memphis College of Art and his MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art.
I am interested in the sending and receiving of information. I wonder how a simple conversation is absorbed between people, how they’re connected, and what the conversational wavelengths would look like. The main idea is to create abstractions from conversations if you could see sound waves from analogue and digital devices passing through and around people. I imagine it to be very chaotic, yet beautiful.
My work is purposefully busy in reference to the busy-ness in our lives.Our thoughts are busy, and I’ve long been interested in what a thought process looks like in the brain, imagining firings of color and structure. I see my works as explosions of thoughts, snippets of conversations, weavings of words and lyrics – a visualization of communication.
The iconic speech bubble is a confined space that conveys communication. I am using a similarly contained white space of the panel to insert colored bursts with embedded depictions of this information. While I work I pick through mentally archived phrases and dwell on them, building them in layers of paint and wood. Silence and pauses are important to me as well, evidenced by the negative space.
