Madeleine Slavick’s Art of Looking
Madeleine Slavick’s Art of Looking
Essay by David Mealing for EyeContact – 10 October, 2021
Madeleine Slavick, Supermarket and Tree, from the Family Tree Whakapapa series, 2020
Slavick's abstract yet realist style has evolved as much out of her working method as it has out of conscious aesthetic decisions. The artistic sensibility that infuses her best images is derived from mastering the fundamentals of photography, dispensing with aspects of it that might hinder her ability to take the kind of pictures she wants, and relating it to personal, social, political, and environmental concerns. Her photos demonstrate a natural ability to comprehend, absorb, and then undertake the process of the art of looking.
For a close examination of Madeleine Slavick’s photographic contribution, let’s start by looking at Supermarket and Tree, a colour photograph taken from an empty lot in Wairarapa. It is an image that operates on a number of different levels. In one sense it is quite spare with little content, but in fact references not only its place, but a realist and abstractionist aesthetic. It embraces realism and pop art; colour field painting; minimalism; and abstraction. The title is ambiguous, and also intuitive. It is intelligently composed to represent a tree, but more realistically a hedge, or vine, clinging to life along a barren grey concrete block wall in a lifeless, soulless, concrete infested urban landscape.
The photograph is essentially four horizontal bands of colour, and reads as sky/tree & green painted surface/ lower wall/ground. Firstly, the top band of the sky is a light blue/white-coloured wash. Secondly, the next descending band of tree/hedge and green wall-painted surface is divided into a 1/3 and 2/3 scale. The lesser left-hand side of the horizontally structured image reads as a representational work, and depicts the tree/hedge in a dense dark green band, with vine-like tendrils reaching out and downwards to the concrete floor. The dominant vertical right-hand side of the image is pure colour field/abstraction and displays a fluorescent light green band of colour butting up against the right-hand side of the tree/hedge.
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