EWA SŁAPA
lines, planes, bodies
September 13 - October 18, 2025
Opening Reception on SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 13th, 5 to 8pm
BEST PRACTICE is pleased to announce the opening of lines, planes, bodies, a solo exhibition of the work of Los Angeles-based artist Ewa Słapa. This work extends her exploration of the relationship between perception and thought. The central question guiding this body of work concerns the organizing principles governing these processes, with particular attention to the mechanics of vision and its relationship to the formation of mental images as well as their reciprocal nature.
Human vision is not continuous but fragmented: the eyes shift rapidly across a scene in saccadic movements, fixating briefly on selected points. In the 1950s and 1960s, Soviet psychologist Alfred Yarbus studied these dynamics, demonstrating that the eye does not wander aimlessly but bends to the questions we carry.
In his influential 1965 book Eye Movements and Vision he was describing the examination of the eye movements during perception of complex objects: one painting—Repin’s Unexpected Visitor (1884-1888)—was viewed seven times, each time with a different task. Using his self-constructed eye tracking device, Yarbus recorded the observers' eye movements during the three-minutes viewing sessions. His diagrams showed how the gaze traces distinct trajectories depending on whether a viewer is asked to consider the age of figures in a painting, their clothing, or simply to look freely. His findings revealed that when we view a complex scene, we show repeated cycles of inspection behavior. During these cycles, the eye stops and examines only selected elements of the picture (so called “fixating”, which is not determined by color, brightness or outlines in the image, but the usefulness of the information), and ignores those deemed irrelevant. Yarbus demonstrated that our perception is not neutral but conditioned by attention, intention, and context. 1 His study raised the question of to what extent cognitive factors influence the viewing experience. The importance of his demonstration of cognitive control of inspection behavior has had an impact on areas as diverse as psychology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, computer science, and engineering.
In this exhibition, Słapa translates Yarbus’s recorded eye movements into stainless-steel sculptures, rendering the act of looking as physical form, and lifting the diagrams of vision into space. These works transform ephemeral traces of attention into objects of perception themselves, mapping the shifts between the imagined, the representational, and the real.
The choice of Repin’s Unexpected Visitor (1884–88), the painting used in Yarbus’s experiments, holds personal resonance for the artist. Growing up in Poland during the communist era, Słapa’s earliest artistic education came from a catalog of works from the Tretyakov Gallery—her only art book, studied obsessively, annotated, and worn by use. Among its reproductions was Repin’s painting, which thus formed part of the foundation of her artistic formation. Its reemergence through Yarbus’s experiments reconnected the work to her own biography, fusing the research, cultural history, and personal memory. That cognitive trace of the painting illuminated like a bright signal in the mind’s map.
In computer vision, a saliency map identifies the regions of an image deemed most significant for human attention or for the algorithm in machine learning models. Słapa adapts this concept in a silkscreened panel, overlaying her own imagined saliency map onto Repin’s composition. This work documents her personal process of looking—selection, resonance, and assimilation, while reflecting on how images are metabolized and reconstituted in the mind.
The question of organizing principle in mediation between phenomena and thought takes on a different turn in the coal sculptures of ornamental garden animals. Coal—once a fundamental resource for heat and energy in the artist’s upbringing—is here reshaped into kitsch images of “nature,” destabilizing the distinction between natural and artificial. These works point to the ways in which mental images, shaped by emotion and cultural mediation, order material form. As with Yarbus’s studies, they underscore how perception and representation is never free from the entanglement of cognition and affect. This pattern of entanglement, revealed in the material and stylistic translation, points to the question of possibility, or maybe impossibility of all-encompassing, unmediated encounter.
In these works, Ewa Słapa traces the geometries of attention, and the limits of what emerges within those frames. Invoking the notion of lines, planes, and bodies, the artist gestures toward Spinoza’s vision: perception not as transparency, but as form—limited, ordered, and conditioned by the intersections of many factors, including vision, memory, attention, affect, history and the structures of thought itself.
In these works, Ewa Słapa traces the geometries of attention, and the limits of what emerges within those frames. Invoking the notion of lines, planes, and bodies, 2 the artist gestures toward Spinoza’s vision: perception not as transparency, but as form—limited, ordered, and conditioned by the intersections of many factors, including vision, memory, attention, affect, history and the structures of thought itself.
1. […]Records of eye movements show that observer’s attention is usually held only by certain elements of the picture. As already noted, the study of these elements shows that they give information allowing the meaning of the picture to be obtained. Eye movements reflect the human thought process so the observer's thought may be followed to some extent from records of eye movements (the thought accompanying the examination of the particular object). Alfred Yarbus, Eye Movements and Vision. (Plenum Press, New York, 1967).
2. Spinoza, Baruch. The Collected Works of Spinoza, Vol. I and II, ed. and trans. by Edwin Curley. (Princeton University Press, 1985).
Ewa Słapa is an interdisciplinary artist working in sculpture, installation, and photography. She was born in Poland, where she studied Polish Philology as well as Fine Art at the University of Krakow. She holds a BFA in Fine Art from the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena CA (2014), with an emphasis in Photography and Sculpture, and an MFA in Sculpture from the University of California, Irvine. She currently teaches at the University of California, San Diego, and at the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena.
Her research is located at the intersection of philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and psychoanalysis.
She engages with phenomenology, and questions regarding the structures of consciousness that organize subjective experience of reality and identity. Her work references the indivisible aspects of bodies and subjectivities, blending and blurring the lines between opposing materials and ideologies, the symbolic and the material, and the imaginary and the real.
She is co-founder of Phase Gallery, a contemporary art space located in Los Angeles, focused on experimental and emerging art practices.
https://www.ewaslapa.com/
@ewa.s_a
https://www.phasegallery.com/
@phase_gallery
UPCOMING
Leslye Villaseñor (curated by Elizabeth Rooklidge)
November 8 - December 13
1955 Julian Avenue
San Diego, CA 92113
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25th/Commercial on the Orange Line
Barrio Logan on the Blue Line
Gallery hours (during exhibitions):
Tuesday - Saturday
11am - 4pm