Ewa Slapa

Ewa Slapa serves as an Adjunct Assistant Professor in Fine Art at the University of California, San Diego and teaches at ArtCenter College of Design. An interdisciplinary artist, she works across sculpture, installation, and photography, and co-founded Phase Gallery in Los Angeles to support experimental art practices.

Her educational foundation includes:

• MFA in Sculpture, University of California, Irvine
• BFA in Fine Arts (with distinction), ArtCenter College of Design, emphasis in Photography and Sculpture
• Polish Philology and Fine Art studies, University of Krakow, Poland

Slapa's research explores the interplay between perception and cognition, drawing from phenomenology, psychology, and neuroscience. She investigates how vision and attention shape mental imagery, referencing Alfred Yarbus's eye-tracking experiments and concepts like saliency maps in computer vision. Her work often examines the mediation between phenomena and thought, using materials such as coal and stainless steel to question the boundaries between natural and artificial, real and imagined. She engages with Spinoza's philosophy to frame perception as conditioned by multiple factors including memory, affect, and cultural history.

As co-founder of Phase Gallery, Slapa actively contributes to the Los Angeles art community by providing a platform for emerging artists and experimental projects.