Les Yeux du Monde Art Gallery - Artists - Anne Slaughter

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Anne Slaughter

Terra Incognita: Forty Years

Anne Slaughter's Retrospective exhibition "Terra Incognita: Forty Years of Anne Slaughter, 1966-2006" took place in the spring of 2006 concurrently at Second Street Gallery and Les Yeux du Monde. Few artists can say that they have made work for 40 years and experienced first hand World War II. Anne Slaughter claims both, and this 40-year retrospective and catalogue celebrated her compelling art and biography. Her work is familiar to Charlottesville, the place she has called home since 1957, and yet no major show had ever been mounted to document her art. This two-site exhibition sought to establish the breadth and evolution of this unique artist, presenting mixed media paintings, sculpture, works on paper, and prints made since 1966. Born in Brussels in 1934, Slaughter was six when the Germans marched into Belgium. Her life and travels around the world find expression in her landscapes, abstractions, and later installation and word pieces. Each body of work in her development to 2006 was represented, all touching upon themes constant in her art: the passage of time, the love of the natural world, and the desire to evoke profound feelings through surface materiality. The walls of bombed out buildings, seascapes of Belgium and landscapes of pastoral Virginia, and the earth in all its connotations - all these experiences inform Slaughter, whose tactile expressionism seeks to communicate "our need for silence and a sense of the infinite mystery that is still part of the human condition." For a catalogue of this exhibition, contact us.

CONNECTIONS

Les Yeux du Monde presents the next phase in Anne Slaughter's artistic evolution in the exhibition, "Anne Slaughter: Connections" 10 October - 16 November 2014. Slaughter's statement below gives insight into these new haunting paintings that for the first time in her work include the human form.

Artist's Statement

My passion has always been to renew my self in the natural world, to linger in the vastness of the land, the water and the sky. But also to explore the physical and emotional evidence of the passage of time on that world and on our human presence. I wonder at the beauty of the patina of earth and water on a smooth rock or a desert cliff, the bleached ruins of an ancient city, the layers of paint on a distressed wall or a weathered door, the faded traces of lost writings... The markings of time and the elements speak to me in their subtle colors and textures, and in the layering of our collective and individual memories, the continuity of our human endeavors and yet also of our temporality in a universe that transcends us. For many years, this has been the underpinning of my work as an artist. But in this new body of works, I have for the first time attempted to make the human figure the main focus of my paintings.

At this stage of my life, I needed to address strong emotions that kept surfacing as ripples deep in an ocean become a continuous, powerful wave. The great loss of a childhood friend, a soulmate, was at its edge. But also surging and ebbing were the threads that weave the fabric of human friendship, joys and play, but also loneliness, pain and more and more, irretrievable losses.

I realized, over many months of painting, that as I was layering, transforming and burnishing my materials into distressed surfaces and human figures, I was also continuing the theme of my former work by trying to express the passage of time on the layers of feelings and emotions in our lives. In my mind, I was closing a circle.

Anne Slaughter
October 7, 2014