Approved by God – Tanner Slick
Image credit: Tanner Slick, Small Prick Carries Heavy Load
Approved by God
Tanner Slick
MAY 7-29, 2021
Reception: Friday, May 7, 5-7pm
Sanitary Tortilla Factory presents new works by UNMs College of Fine Art MFA candidate TANNER SLICK. The ambitious, mixed media exhibition, Approved by God the artist blurs boundaries between object/body, pleasure/pain. Binary conditions and beliefs are transformed to complex intersections. The works range from small cast bronze representational distortions of bodies to transporting large-scale installations carefully crafted from scavenged materials. Each piece begins with improvisation and ends in articulated detail. The use of any material necessary approach to sculpting the world they know as a queer, masculine transsexual, southern (anti)belle.
APPROVED BY GOD was the phrase found on a hand painted sign strapped to the basket of a dirty, broken and clearly beloved trike at the Esperanza community bike shop in Albuquerque a few years ago. That trike became the frame for a collaborative mobile sound-cart that Tanner was working on at the time. The statement was as fitting for that beautiful piece of junk as anything else on this earth. If God is the creator of all things, then isn’t everything pre-approved?
Tanner Slick is a sculptor, scavenger and social-practice artist from Atlanta, GA, who is living in Albuquerque. Their art takes form in hand-crafted objects, installations, public interventions, audio/video and community spaces. Often working with reclaimed materials and cultural symbolism, they transform normative ideas of gender, power, sex and violence. From gnarled wood and rusty metal to glam, queer, kink aesthetics, they fuse a non-binary and trans experience with the lawless complexities of the natural, non-human world.
Slick also has a long-standing practice of community-building through collective living, farming/gardening and education projects. Since May of 2020 they have been collaboratively rehabilitating a two-story house on farmland into a shared living, growing and creative space in Albuquerque, NM. Slick received their BA from Mt. Holyoke College in South Hadley, MA in 2008 and is expecting to receive their MFA from the University of New Mexico in the spring of 2021.
Tanner Slick is the recipient of Sanitary Tortilla Factory’s 2021 Exceptional Visual Artist Scholar (EVAS) award. The EVAS series offers professional space for Master of Fine Art graduate students per year as their final thesis show. The culminating exhibition launches them into their profession as an artist. With the series, we underscore exceptional artists attending regional institutions while highlighting Albuquerque’s innovative connection to contemporary art practices.