_{Sarah Slappey}

Sarah Slappey’s bodily compositions act as stimuli for the sense of touch. While the subjects may be void of a clear personhood, the slippery, dancerly limbs that twist in and out of the picture frame often allow for viewers to enter that space. 

We spoke with Slappey about her earliest artwork, horror films, the wonders of touch, and the double edged sword of femininity. 

Sarah Slappey lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. 

---

Do you have a rose and thorn for the past week?

My rose is being back in New York. I did a Chelsea gallery walk around, which I haven't done that in so long. There's some amazing shows up right now. I have friends who have shows up, and getting to celebrate them and their work was wonderful.

I went to my friend Inka’s [Essenhigh] opening at Miles McEnery and the work was fantastic as always. Gina Beavers is great, and Kyle Dunn. Kyle and I show in the same gallery in Zurich, so we've known each other for a while. His color palette is so brilliant. And I thought Jacolby Satterwhite at Mitchell-Innes & Nash was good and surprising.

My thorn is trying to walk into a few galleries, and people with clipboards who were like, “excuse me, do you have an appointment?” One of them I just abandoned when I saw someone asking for appointments. At Sikkema Jenkins I was the only person in line for the Louis Fratino show, which is so good. I didn’t have an appointment but they were like “Oh, it doesn't matter, just come on in,” which was great. But that was a point of frustration.

What kind of art did you make as a kid?

No one has asked me that before. As a kid, I always drew people–always, always, always–I never felt connected to representational art that did not have the human figure in it. When I was really little I would wake up on Saturday mornings, and there was a show called Style with Elsa Klensch. Elsa Klensch was this woman with an Australian accent who would go to all of these fashion shows and report on the couture designs. It came on every Saturday morning, and I would sit there, ready with my sketchbook to draw the people walking down the runway. And so I thought, maybe I wanted to be a fashion designer, but I didn't care about clothes. I just needed a reference point to draw the human figure. I was always drawing or painting. I didn't have much of an interest in sculpture, although, as a kid, everyone goes through that phase of making ceramic ashtrays for their parents who don't necessarily smoke.

I still have the ash trays. I don’t smoke, but that would be a fantastic show, now that I think about it. Ashtrays that artists made as kids. It would be a deep research project, you'd have to find that stuff.

And then going through high school and college, I always worked from the human figure, mostly the female body. Even looking back at my undergrad work now, I was making these portraits of invented nude women. They were always beautiful, but they were always hurting themselves in these strange, surreal ways. I had no idea why I was making this work. This is my freshman year of college, so when we had to write a few paragraphs on the meaning behind our work, I thought I was so clever because I wrote that the meaning is nothing. In hindsight, I'm looking at this arc thinking, “Sarah, this is what you're doing now.” It was all there.

I do have all of my sketchbooks. They were all the same, with the blue-lined paper and every single cover had to be hot pink–every single one. I love looking at them when I go home.

I noticed you had a sculpture on your Instagram of these fingers. I know you already said you didn’t do much sculpture growing up, but are you interested in pursuing that? Your paintings feel so haptic, because there's all these layers interacting in a very three-dimensional way.

       

I think you're exactly right. When I'm painting them, I'm not imagining a two-dimensional surface. I'm imagining a three-dimensional figure. I made that ring sculpture for a particular show, and I haven't gone back to it. I think there is something there. I’m on the edge of finding ways to transform this work into three dimensional work, but I haven't taken that step, because I’m not sure I know how. It hasn't commanded itself quite yet. Maybe it will take the right amount of boredom in the studio or I’ll get tired of making so many paintings.

Do you find yourself pushing your process in a certain direction, or do you let it take you along for the ride? And how important is finding the correct pace for your process?

When I was in grad school, I was in this running pace. I would try something, and if it didn't work, I'd throw it out the window. Then I’d try something else that didn't work, and I would throw that out the window because we were doing critiques all the time. I think I was in this people-pleasing moment. In the studio, I'm not a runner, I put one foot in front of the other. A few paintings down the road, you're 10 steps ahead. I found the pace that works for me. The difference between one painting and another might be relatively small, but then one painting and another within the same show–that difference might be a little bit larger.

I do my best work in a certain comfort zone where I'm pushing, pushing, pushing a little bit, but not throwing stuff out of the window. That makes your job unnecessarily hard, like walking through a dark room with pieces of furniture and running into every piece of furniture before I found myself on the other side. Why torture yourself?

Yellow Touch, 2018,
oil on canvas, 44 x 42 inches

Obviously, the paintings are visual, but I want them to be more about touch than anything else. Because maybe aside from smell, touch is the most visceral thing that we do. It's so loaded. You touch your partner, you touch your own body, but then people also get into fist fights. It's this way of communicating that has a wide range of emotional tone to it. Sometimes you can't read it. The wide meaning is what is very interesting to me, and also gives a wide interpretation of the work.

As a person, as a woman, sometimes you feel very sexy and like you want to be touched. And other times you feel like a disgusting animal, like “get away from me.” Of all the senses, touch is the most important thing, and maybe the second is visual, but I don't know how to make a painting that does not have the visual component.

Lavender Lattice, 2020,
oil on canvas, 64 x 58 inches

Lipstick Landscape, 2020,
oil on canvas, 60 x 72 inches