NAME: Andrew Sloat | Drainage Ditch
LATIN NAME: cloaca derivationis (literal translation of Drainage Ditch)
AGE:29

On any given day you’ll find Andrew Sloat doing a lot of things you wouldn’t necessarily associate with graphic design. He might be attending a rehearsal for a theatrical production by the South Pleasant Company, volunteering at the local co-op, tending trees on his street, canoeing on the Gowanus canal, hosting Last Monday (a party “for boy and girl homosexuals and their friends”) or teaching at Hunter College. Far from being distractions from aspects of his practice that are more recognizably design oriented —creating interstitial videos for the Sundance Channel and designing books for Edizioni Press, Aperture and the New Press, for example—such activities are actually an integral part of Sloat’s holistic view of design. “The reason I’ve stayed with graphic design is that it’s a form, not a subject,” he says. “I like that my job allows me to dabble in eight different topics at the same time.”

In many of the things he’s involved in, Sloat is the person who brings visual issues to the table. His sense of graphic design, he says, is rooted in his liberal arts education, which he defines as “a way of encountering a subject with a set of questions rather than a body of knowledge.” Sloat’s study of theater at Amherst College, therefore, “was not about how to make professional-quality theater —we were specifically told we would not.” Instead it was about learning “how to ask questions about what theater was and how it worked and what metaphors might be brought to other subjects.” After Amherst, Sloat continued his studies at the Yale School of Art where he found fruitful ways to connect his work in set and lighting design to his evolving design practice. “The idea I was working with,” Sloat says, “was that 2D planes could be understood as windows into 3D spaces, much the way a proscenium stage is both a picture frame and a window.” He began to work intensively with video and created a series of meticulously choreographed sequences in which actors carrying letterforms arrange and rearrange themselves to form words and phrases. Performative typography—a genre that combines the tools of both theater and graphic design—proved a rich seam of inquiry for Sloat; indeed, he continues to develop it today. The most recent iteration of this theme can be found in a holographic installation Sloat created for a gala event in which live speakers communicate with holographic projections and interact with quotations that seem to float in space.

Theatrical thinking is apparent in other areas of Sloat’s work, too, such as his art direction of photography and the sequencing of his book design. He reflects on this correlation between print and stage thus: “The way I research graphic languages reminds me of the way that I was trained to approach set design: research the subject matter and its era, study its grammar and vocabulary closely and then figure out how to speak in a contemporary voice while using the visual lexicon you’ve uncovered.” Alice Twemlow

(TOP): For its FOR A CHANGE campaign, Sundance Channel asked Sloat to make short, interstitial clips responding to the concept of change. “I did a six-panel split screen and made six different sets of something changing: tuxedo to T-shirt, Bombay to Mumbai, speeds, etc. This example was the longest, about changing colors. Each panel was done separately, carefully counted to a metronome so they’d all line up when the six pieces were put together.”