Studio Visit | Jeff Slomba
Jeff Slomba opens the door to his West Haven home and leads me to the dining room. On the far wall, a collection of recent 3D-printed works fill the space. At first brush, Slomba’s sculptures—with their allusions to classical and mythological figures such as Saint George slaying the fabled dragon and the Roman Goddess Venus—align themselves with traditional techniques; the soft white surface of the printed nylon belies the technical production of this body of work. Slomba’s practice merges his interest in technology with his education as a figurative sculptor.
Much of the imagery in Slomba’s recent pieces comes from cameos—petite works, often figurative in nature, carved in relief on pieces of stone or shell—that Slomba discovered during a trip to Rome in the fall of 2018. “The interest in taking [the cameo] on as the form and subject was the confluence of sustainability and art history,” explains Slomba, a faint Southern drawl detectable in his voice. “I don’t believe that we repeat art history, but I think we re-perform these epic plays of morality. I’m repurposing these images for contemporary work.”
Jeff Slomba, Arcadia (2018). Courtesy of the artist.
Winding our way up to his third-floor studio space, Slomba underscores the significance of his decision to embrace the miniature. Prior to his most recent visit to Rome, he had no interest in decorative or diminutive objects. His undergraduate training as a figurative sculptor at the College of William & Mary in Virginia favored narrative art. After college, Slomba took anatomy classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art before receiving his Masters of Fine Arts degree from the State University of New York at Buffalo. “My formative sculpting teachers were Modernist and figurative sculptors that pushed monumentality,” says Slomba, and previously, he had tackled projects on much bigger scales.
His installation Alternating Currents (2010) in the Sunroom Project Space at Wave Hill featured oversized forms: the shell of a veined Rapa whelk, a sea snail native to East Asia, and a horseshoe crab, both carved out of wood. Within each, Slomba embedded speakers that played the rhythmic sounds of ocean waves as well as the drone of the highway traffic. The project questioned how the natural world lives alongside—or in defiance of—our constructed environments, a theme that reverberates throughout his recent works.
The decision to work digitally and with such portable sizes stems from his desire to be environmentally conscious. Slomba fused these two concepts in a 2015 project while on sabbatical from his tenured teaching position at Southern Connecticut State University. He brought a handheld 3D scanner—an emerging technology at that time—on a trip to Rome and Venice. Around the latter, he collected dozens of three-dimensional models of the sinking city. “As an object maker, having a three-dimensional scan of something is much more useful than a photograph,” says Slomba, who has captured some of the sinking city’s most famous artworks.
Jeff Slomba scanning Portrait of the Four Tetrarchs in Saint Mark’s Square, Venice, Italy (2015). Courtesy of the artist.
Scans of Portrait of the Four Tetrarchs, a porphyry sculpture that has been attached to a corner of the Basilica in Saint Mark’s Square since the Middle Ages, are incorporated in Slomba’s sculpture Acqua Alta (2016-19). Stacks of red Solo cups correspond to the height of recent flooding events in Venice, with the small portraits of the tetrarchs appearing inside the top cup. Last November, Slomba reworked the composition, reaching a record height as high tides of brackish and polluted waters encroached on the lagoon.
Because of the recurring flooding, Venetian Sculptures such as the Four Tetrarchs face constant threat. As its weight slowly submerges the city into the sea, Venice regularly swells with water, causing extensive damage to the entire area. Throughout his trip, Slomba envisioned amassing enough data so that Venice could be reconstructed in another location, free from these perils. Around this time, he recalled reading an article in National Geographic magazine about how Iceland’s elevation is rising. To Slomba, this small Nordic country became an ideal backdrop for his theoretical re-staging of Venice.
While this project has yet to be fully realized, it opened up Slomba’s practice. His methods of conceiving and executing projects have become looser—less tied to a physical product—and increasingly conceptual as a result. Slomba’s cameos, an as-yet-unnamed body of work, draw heavily from his personal archive of scanned Italian works. Some versions of these sculptures have never been printed, stored on Slomba’s hard drive until the opportune time.
Jeff Slomba, Fight the Dragon (2019). Courtesy of the artist.
When Slomba begins to fabricate his sculptures from his digital models, he combines his own references with the imagery he has collected. Lately, he has been culling from 1970s film stills. His children and his partner frequently appear in these small dioramas and they play various roles with meanings Slomba prefers to leave less determined or fixed for viewers. In Fight the Dragon (2019), the face and body of one of his sons were used to create parts of both characters in the scene. The extreme foreshortening of the figure in Levitator (2019) resulted from several scans of his partner.
Whatever final form the models become, they are always printed in white and placed inside brilliant blue plastic buckets. This setup helps Slomba create the illusion of deep space within a shallow physical form. Renaissance painters utilized the same trick in their depictions of the landscape using atmospheric perspective. Despite the blue’s intensity, the hue recedes.
“For now, I see these works as self-contained vignettes,” explains Slomba. “I am hoping that they are ambiguous enough that they are not prescriptive. I like the space of curiosity. They are curious objects and people seem to want to decipher them.”
Jeff Slomba, Levitator (2019). Courtesy of the artist.
While this series insists on viewer interpretation, another body of work across his studio presents a more straightforward reading. Slomba’s Tidal Capsules are also slight in scale, but their meaning is far easier to parse. Inside clear plastic Solo cups, Slomba assembles delicate miniatures. All of the elements in these tiny sculptures come from trash he finds on the West Haven beach near his home. Some of these petite curios represent all the detritus he finds on a particular day, imbuing the works with a personal and diaristic quality.
Jeff Slomba, Works from the Tidal Capsule series (2016-19). Courtesy of the artist.
Making art from trash is not novel, but Slomba brings a sense of precision to these works. While so many contemporary assemblage pieces do not rise above their origin as trash, Slomba’s capsules have a bizarre beauty. Some recall ships or aquatic organisms with their spindly textures and translucent surfaces. The series is striking and strange while commenting on the relationship between humans and the natural environment.
For a current installation included in the group show Mill Street, Slomba touches on the environment again. Four sculptural works, connected by a copper piping system, imply the inner workings of an elaborate fountain. Two of the Venetian Tetrarchs make an appearance—this time within a tower of blue buckets. Behind this ersatz fountain, a large bank of windows of the abandoned warehouse building offers a panorama of the industrial landscape and the Mill River. Slomba uses this riparian backdrop to consider the global flow of water.
In this installation and many others, the environment—especially the relationship between humans and natural bodies of water—flows through Slomba’s practice. From the interior of a blue bucket to the contents of a Solo cup, Slomba makes peepholes or other kinds of openings for viewers to investigate and make sense of his work. “The world is very chaotic today,” Slomba says, “and the oculus is a way for me to organize and confine the chaos.”
Mill Street opens February 22 at 2 p.m. at 26 Mill Street, New Haven, CT 06513.
