Spirit Duplicator

Spirit Duplicator is an exhibition of three artists whose work conjures specters of desire and loss. The contained ghosts operate ambiguously between trace and premonition, their dissolution conjuring the potential of reanimation. Sarah LaPonte, Gabriel Slavitt, and Dylan Lewis meet in these considerations, pulling phantoms from weather phenomena, folklore, and rural landscapes. In the spirit of impermanence, the exhibited works center on paper-based media, including zines, photographs, drawings, and printed ephemera.

Gabriel Slavitt’s comic Master of Return imagines a story within a story, using the Jewish legend of the golem to question the lines between dreams, decisions, knowledge, and control. His black ink drawings pulse with detail; at times the visual texture almost subsumes the characters as they contemplate the implications of discarding one type of life in choosing another. Slippery yet present forces run through Slavitt’s work; figures hover above their own shadows, about to either make contact or step into a void. The drawings impose distance, asking the viewer to imagine what is unseen. This imagining emerges also in Sarah LaPonte’s recent zines, The Color of Lightning and The Right to Disappear, through the intersection of superstition and natural phenomena. Her constellation of personal narrative and source texts illustrate how we reach for structures that order our experiences of luck and loss. The publications complement LaPonte’s photographic practice, which infuses magical thinking into mundane moments. Her world is dirty floors and open skies, shared meals and walls down to the studs. Dylan Lewis’s images also carry this haunted mundanity of places apart. Empty of inhabitants yet charged with the leftover spell of presence, Lewis’s photographs construct fictions using “the emotional texture of dreams within an always-already fractured reality.” The series Junebug vs. Hurricane uses the disappearance of folk musician Connie Converse to think about the downfall of fantasy as a reckoning point. Lush red curtains promise a version of luxury quickly fading. When a dream fails, what story is left?

The exhibition is curated by Dodd MFA candidate, Katie Ford.

Sarah LaPonte (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Greensboro, North Carolina. Working largely with text, soft sculpture, and printmaking, her pieces reinterpret familiar household objects and social spaces in playful and uncanny ways; creating immersive, interactive installations that often involve eccentric, highly-curated, thematic food and drink experiences. She holds a BFA from the Pacific Northwest College of Art and a MFA from the University of North Carolina Greensboro, where she is currently an Instructor of Record.

Dylan Lewis is a photographer, writer, and visual artist based in Athens, GA. His work explores the tension between image-as-documentation and image-as-construction, as well as themes of memory, longing, fantasy, and solitude. His photographs attempt to disrupt the already fraught relationship between image, language, and narrative, and to create a space where new forms of meaning-making emerge. Lewis studied English and Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University and is currently a MFA candidate at the University of Georgia. His work has been featured by The Heavy Collective, Pomegranate Press, Ghost City Press, and others.

Gabriel Slavitt’s art is an ongoing study of what it means to fit into the world, particularly the tension between moments of transcendental oneness (peace of mind) and moments of anxious obscurity, when you are swallowed up by the motions of social life. Presented in simple, blocky forms with minimal use of color, Slavitt’s work is still and contemplative, often a solitary figure or empty landscape, eyes in shadow, or an observer is presented and the audience is invited to look in over their shoulder. Blending painting, sculpture, and drawing, the materials are earnest and easily accessible: over-the-counter house paint mixed into wall plaster, jigsawed MDF, drop cloths. But there is an elusive complexity. Mixing the paint into the plaster introduces unpredictable colors and textures. Canvas is pressed into a carved form revealing an invisible presence. Currently based in Los Angeles,  Slavitt was born in Park Ridge, IL and received his BFA in Sculpture from Washington University in St. Louis. He has had solo shows at Elsa Lee Bruno Gallery in Los Angeles and Snowflake Projects in St. Louis. He has also been included in group exhibitions at Central Park Gallery, Los Angeles, and White Flag Projects, St. Louis, among others. His work is included in the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art.