Spencer Sloan’s computer-manipulated digital photographs in Celebrity Candids, at Spalding Nix Fine Art through April 15, are a survey of the most recent of his single-copy editions of painterly digital productions deriving from celebrity photographs found online. Sloan transforms these originals with multiple photo-manipulation programs, some of them commonplace apps found on most people’s smartphones. Others are less familiar; the partial list Sloan provided includes Decim8, Glitch Lab, Pixel is Data, Time Piles, DataBender, PixiVisor and, of course, Photoshop.
Sufficiently interested visitors can ask to see some of Sloan’s earliest versions of this process, dating from 2012, which are on the premises but not part of the exhibition. Printed in watercolor-like pastels on paper, rather than in vivid palettes produced from immense digital files and mounted to Plexiglas, they form an instructive contrast to the work from 2015 to the present that appears on the gallery walls.