Artist Interviews 2025

Gabriel Slavitt  
By Johnny Otto



Your work often involves a mix of painting and sculptural elements. What draws you to this hybrid approach, and how do you decide on the materials for each piece?

Growing up, I was an avid drawer. I was inspired by a lot of graphic art like Dave Sim’s and Art Spiegelman’s comics, Raymond Pettibon’s early punk flyers, and all the wild work of the Chicago Imagists. When I got to college, I discovered the more abstract world of conceptual art and wound up majoring in sculpture. I constantly explored new mediums at that time: durational videos, ready-mades, sound art, spices, steel, and woodworking. My current work is a sort of coming home for me, a return to my earlier artistic sensibilities filtered through a more expansive conceptual headspace and a sculptor’s structural approach to working through an object in terms of its arrangement. The return to wall work, and the materials that I’ve used for the past decade, were both dictated by limitations. Ten years ago, I had no studio space and was making work on my bed (I didn’t even have spare floorspace then), using materials I had on hand from freelance construction jobs. Over the years I’ve experimented with different ratios of mixing house paint with drywall mud to achieve various effects. These materials, which originated in the language of humble labor, have expanded into an extensive emotional vocabulary. Ranging from thick, chunky, cracking applications to very delicate, translucent layers of paint. The specific material choices for each piece are intuitive but guided by these emotional considerations for how they’ll underscore the intended message.



Wheel of Fortune references the Chinese concept of Wufu and contrasts Eastern and Western philosophies. How do you incorporate philosophical ideas into your artwork?

For me, the act of making art is inherently philosophical. I’m less interested in making aesthetic objects than I am in making something that allows for a concentrated meditation on the experience of certain metaphysical ideas. The work synthesizes ideas of quantum mechanics, cosmology, chaos theory, psychology, Zen Buddhism, and Judaism (among others), but modulated through my personal experiences of loss, grief, anxiety, and depression. I’m curious about the cyclical spiral of emotions that take you in and out of conformity with these larger philosophies/teachings, while also investigating ways in which systemic understandings become dogmatic or are otherwise limited.



Reflection captures a meeting point between technology and nature. How does your personal experience with urban and natural environments influence your creative vision?

I tend to present ideas in my art through a layering of dichotomies woven together in a sort of abstract conversation, a diverse set of opposites that reveal a dialogue in the push and pull of how they interact. Comparing how the natural and urban environment, the strange ways they interact, and the surreal way the two crush up against each other in Los Angeles is a huge inspiration for my work. Look down and it’s all freeways and car crashes; look up and there is a broad wall of mountains right behind it all. The endless sprawl of construction is dotted with endless varieties of beautiful plant life. The sun sets in a toxic blaze, replaced by a night sky flooded with light pollution. These themes have made it into my work time and again – in paintings like Headless Palm, Emily’s Garden, From Memory, Reflection, the Bridge of Dreams series, and Master of Return. What really draws me in is the idea of boundaries and the human sense of order – how it’s perceived and how it’s created. The natural world seems to have no agency, but it settles into a pattern that seems inarguable. Meanwhile the human impulse towards a built world and self-imposed structure has always seemed not just artificial, but limiting and isolating – bound to fall short, while the wild steadily persists.



In Emily’s Garden, From Memory, you spent an entire year carving the piece by hand. Can you talk about the patience and dedication involved in your artistic process?

Oh boy! I wish there were a more conceptual justification for the patience and dedication I put into it. But truthfully, the steady, demanding labor is more a byproduct of my relationship to my art practice. This could be seen in a spiritual light, although I don’t necessarily feel spiritual about it. It relates to the source of the art and the drive to make it. I feel that art is my way of physicalizing a thought. I would call it an idea, but often it is simply a question, or the wandering experience in and out of knowing. I feel a very intimate connection with these questions – what is it to disappear into the natural flow of things, to be undone by fears and anxiety? As a result, I feel similarly about making the resulting art objects. It’s important to me to touch every part of the work, to do as much of it as possible on my own (although, sometimes I have to ask a friend to come help me put a piece on the wall). I feel proud to try to work within my means, and to push myself to the absolute limit of my abilities. A regulating element in all this is that I usually envision the completed work before I begin, so I’m able to analyze how challenging the process might be and what will be required of me. Truthfully, putting in so much hard labor is often extremely difficult, if not downright discouraging, but it is always important to me and ultimately empowering. Achieving each work opens a door to something even more expansive. Putting a full year into Emily’s Garden helped me become the artist who was willing to make Reflection, a painting so big that I had to hang it sideways in my studio and had to remove my front door frame to get it out. Not that art making has to be a punishing test of endurance, but it’s a matter of answering the call when the work asks to take a certain form.



Many of your works, such as 21st Century Voyeurism and Keyholder’s Cargo, play with themes of perception and hidden narratives. Do you intend for viewers to engage in a form of self-reflection when observing your work?

It is my dearest wish for the work to inspire self-reflection. In a world that jostles people between serving others for money and the desperate search for respite and comfort as a counter to that labor, there seems to be so little time afforded to self-reflection, or really any reflection at all. Art is a springboard, an opportunity for experimental, or illogical connections of images and ideas to inspire someone to better understand themselves, or to feel inspiration from a deeper understanding of a certain concept. I’m grateful to offer my work in service of that kind of thinking.



Your use of color, such as the carefully chosen blue in Emily’s Garden, From Memory, appears deeply intentional. How do you approach color selection in your pieces?

Interestingly, I don’t usually think in color. When I do, I tend to have a very blunt sense of “This piece will be green”. If I’m lucky I will know I want the piece to be dark green. Emily’s Garden was a very singular instance where I knew I wanted a certain color because I wanted it to match a specific memory of the color of predawn light, when the world begins to take shape but everything is gray-purple-blueish and no real color has come into anything yet. It’s the one time I’ve truly chased a color so devotedly and it took me several months to get it mixed to my satisfaction. In fact, it was so hard to figure out the color that I put the piece away out of despair for nearly four years! However, I don’t normally consider myself to have a strong intuitive sense of color. I work with color quite a bit, but it’s something that I wrestle with, and rather happily so. There are so many aspects of my art-making process that I feel a clear control over. Certain materials, certain tools. I enjoy the engaging challenge of determining the colors I want to work with and the raw feeling of discovery as I see a piece take form with them. Part of what draws me to painting with drywall mud mixed in is that the colors change as the piece dries, so that often things look completely different a day or two after I first put the paint on. I like inviting this sort of surprise into the work because I like feeling that I’m engaging with something that is beyond my control, and because these changes of color, along with the appearance of cracks in the paint, reveal an aspect of the image that often surprises me with my own new understanding.



You’ve exhibited at various galleries and even published a comic book, Master of Return. How do different mediums inform your storytelling, and do you see a connection between your paintings and your comic work?

Storytelling is an interesting way to consider my work. There is, of course, a narrative story in Master of Return, and I often use the comic book framework of sequential panels in my paintings and larger ink drawings as a way to address the presence of time and certain very small narratives of sorts. But the appeal for me is the way time (and space) become abstracted through how it collapses. We generally perceive time passing because each moment is constantly being replaced, but in a comic every moment is, in a sense, presented simultaneously. This way past and future can be in dialogue, and the meta-awareness of time passing becomes a way for me to also consider memories and emotions. I’m concerned with not being didactic in my art. While I am storytelling in a sense, it’s more in the manner of weaving together various concepts, searching for the intangible interrelationships between them. Master of Return was an interesting challenge because I put so much content into it, and it was all addressed almost directly through dialogue and thought through by the characters. That was another multi-year project, largely because I took a break from drawing for almost a whole year to work on the language and the pace of the story; I also tried to ensure there was still enough abstract space behind the conversation so that the reader could piece together their own impressions.



What’s next for you? Are there any upcoming projects or themes you’re excited to explore in your future work?

I’m currently working on an absolute beefcake of a painting. It’s a very complex shaped nine-foot by ten-foot panel that has nine separate sculpted elements mounted to its surface. I’ve been really inspired by a close friendship I’ve developed with a few authors I met at the Vermont Studio Center – talking to them about their writing methodologies has pushed my work towards a higher level of complexity. I’m challenging myself to layer more elements, to generate more levels of dialogue between the imagery and to convey subtler and more far-ranging thoughts. Part of this has also been challenging myself to take bigger risks with colors and with painting in a way that is far less planned in advance. Very happily this new work will be presented in a solo show at Babst Gallery early next year. I will also have a piece in a group show opening at Curve Line Space in May.