About Gerald Slota
Gerald Slota is a New Jersey–based fine artist and photographer whose work redefines the boundaries of photography through acts of deconstruction and reinvention. Trained in traditional photographic methods, Slota soon became fascinated by what happens when images are pushed beyond their original meaning. Using techniques such as tearing, burning, scratching, and drawing, he reshapes found and personal photographs into deeply psychological, fragmented compositions that blur the line between reality and imagination. His process transforms the photograph from a record of truth into a site of emotional exploration and visual storytelling.
Slota’s work has been exhibited widely across the United States and abroad, including solo shows at the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY; Langhans Galerie in Prague, Czech Republic; and numerous exhibitions at Ricco/Maresca Gallery in New York City. His art has also been featured internationally at Recontres d’Arles in France and is represented by the Robert Berman Gallery in Los Angeles. His images have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Vice, The New Yorker, Aperture, and Artforum, among many others, gaining recognition for their haunting intimacy and innovative visual language.
Beginning often with discarded family photographs or vintage imagery, Slota constructs works that feel both familiar and disquieting. His layered compositions evoke the way memory functions—partial, distorted, and emotionally charged. Through these transformations, he invites viewers to confront the hidden stories that lie beneath the surface of the image, merging the personal with the collective and the nostalgic with the uncanny. Each piece becomes a meditation on loss, desire, and the fragile ways we construct identity through images.
Among his many honors, Slota has received a Polaroid 20”x24” Grant, a MacDowell Artist Residency, and multiple Mid-Atlantic Fellowship Grants. In 2021, he was commissioned to create an 18’ x 18’ mural on the Seminole Indian Wars for the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida. He currently teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York City and has lectured at institutions such as the International Center for Photography.
For Slota, art is an act of excavation—each alteration of the photograph uncovers new emotional terrain. His work occupies a delicate balance between destruction and beauty, fragmentation and clarity. In transforming the photograph into something tactile and raw, he challenges viewers to look closer, to see how the past lingers in the present, and to find meaning in what has been broken and remade.