CHARLIZE THERON - PUSHES A CART FULL OF GROCERIES IN LOS ANGELES, JANUARY 5, 2015

Spencer Sloan

Meet Spencer Sloan: former pop-culture blogger, current mixed media artist, and refreshingly honest recovering celebrity junkie. “I know tabloids are bad and that most celebrities would prefer you didn’t take their picture as they’re leaving Starbucks in their pajamas and that it can be an invasion of their privacy and how terrible the paparazzi can be and, yet, I still like looking at pictures of celebrities, so, here we are,” he confesses. In his most recent work, however, the Atlanta-based Sloan digitally manipulates these paparazzi photographs into abstraction — from Stephanie Seymour - wearing a swimsuit in St. Barts (12/26/12) to Zooey Deschanel - at a local stable in LA (1/20/13) — using a series of image-corrupting applications on his iPhone. The original source material captions become the titles.

 

Medium: Glitch Art
Location: San Francisco
Date: 2015

For Dolby®, then, Sloan created, Charlize Theron — pushes a cart full of groceries in Los Angeles, January 5, 2015, using a paparazzi photograph in the same way. What develops is a colorful, abstract image without any resemblance of the original. “Conceptual glitch art,” he calls it. What he’s doing is actually the antithesis of what Dolby does with sound — while Dolby works to reduce digital noise, he works to amplify it. But on a metaphorical level it goes much deeper than the visual result. “My work explores the obsession with celebrity culture, the invasion of privacy and the complex issues of ownership of image, appropriation, and copyright.... turning the voyeuristic into the inviolable, creating a postmodern commentary on societal values in relation to contemporary pop culture,” Sloan says.

 

We can assume he still prefers his audio sans glitch, though. “I have to listen to music while I’m working, so, between the audio files, the computer and the headphones, Dolby technology has to be in there somewhere helping me get it done.”

Spencer Sloan