About

Theresa Slater (she/they) is a neuroqueer artist living and loving in tkaranto as a white settler, painter, writer, step-parent, and project manager. They are dedicated to perceptual experimentation, media exploration, and self-expression. For the past few years, her art practice has been exploring a psychedelic aesthetic. She explores insight experiences questioning “what is real” by demonstrating the visual novelty of non-normative states of consciousness in paint and digital drawings. Their process-based creative practice addresses neurodivergence, trauma, nihilism, and mystical experience. She re-contextualizes acid wave and cyberdelic efforts in painting while considering the post-painterly abstraction movement of the 1960s. Her work makes material the incomprehensible sensations of transcendence, and that makes writing about their work difficult.
 
Slater is an MA graduate of OCAD U in the Contemporary Art, Design, and New Media Art Histories (2016) program with a critical focus on technology and feminism. Slater analyzed the ethical and ontological properties of digital objects in their MA thesis, Sensual Alterity of Digital Objects (2016). Last year, she published a co-authored book chapter in Critical Digital Making in Art Education (Peter Lang Publishing, 2020). Beforehand, they were awarded a BA Philosophy Degree, with a minor in Applied Ethics from UVIC, BC (2013). In her youth, she studied mixed media, craft, and design at the Kootenay School of the Arts (Nelson, BC, 2003). Slater’s current interests include psychedelic and experimental aesthetics, new materialism, popular science, Christian decolonization, and becoming a death doula. 
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