A Plan: Vacation, Lidija Slavkovic’s first New York exhibition, will be on view at Studio Vendome Projects from October 22 - November 22, 2014. The exhibition will include drawings of landscapes made with acrylic, graphite, charcoal pencil, and coffee. A reception for the artist will be held on Wednesday, October 22 from 6-8 pm. Studio Vendome Projects is located at 30 Grand Street, New York, NY.

The title of the exhibition A Plan: Vacation has a double meaning – the most obvious is one’s associations with seascapes and landscapes as vacation destinations. But the more important aspect is that the title reflects how Slavkovic thinks about retrieving her imagery from what are generally considered “Landscapes,” and therefore immediately being reduced to metaphor. In this context the term “A Plan” refers to her view that a drawing is no more than a plan (procedures and preparations) and as such a proposition - concerning the objectification of some concept, which is always incomplete. For Slavkovic plans exist in time and are subject to change and therefore her drawings are less a statement of intention, than a statement of her attention. Likewise, her use of the term “vacation” refers to the "action of leaving something one previously occupied" and to vacate: "to render inoperative; deprive of validity; void; annul" those concepts preconception, assumptions and habits that precede her and the viewers’ experience. As such, her drawings are the result of her trying to make inoperative the common understanding of Landscape as a symbol of something.

“I see my work as an object of attention, in that the work is a reflection of my relationship to some ‘thing’,” says Slavkovic. “I acknowledge that my concept is only an impermanent objectification of sensation, thus I think of my drawings not as an art work but as the result of the work of art.”

Slavkovic employs various techniques and a contemporary perspective to map and expose the layered possibilities that lie between abstraction, materiality, and the effects of time. She begins her drawings by tracing a projected image and then treats each element – line, form, surface, etc. as if it has an existence of its own. By these means, she is able to articulate what each element shares with the others.

The fact that Slavkovic’s works juxtapose differing approaches in constructing her images of the landscape is a consequence of her recognition that the process of transcription is separate from the ability to transform the contingent content of her drawings into mere images of landscape. It is through this flux that her drawings represent our contemporary condition in which the partial overlap or intersection of things leads to each potentiality standing for some other. In this way, Slavkovic’s landscapes become a subspecies of the genre Landscape, which is both defined and negated by its actualization.

About Lidija Slavkovic

Born in Belgrade, Serbia, Slavkovic earned a BFA in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade in 1999. Also in 1999, she was granted membership in the Association des Arts Plastiques de Serbie. In 2000, after receiving the Dean’s Grant from the Academy of Fine Arts, Slavkovic left Belgrade to study painting and drawing at The School of the Arts Institute of Chicago. She completed her MFA at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale in 2004.

Slavkovic has participated in numerous juried and invitational national and international exhibitions and residencies. In 2012, she began work on “An Ambition", a group of collaborative projects with art critic and curator Saul Ostrow that focuses on the question of “what images signify.” Since 2011, Slavkovic has been conducting research about the relationship between visual and spoken language. In 2013, part of the research was included in a book published by Paris College as part of Tate London research.

Slavkovic lives and works in Belgrade, Serbia and Miami, Florida.