Rachel Sydlowski is a visual artist and educator. She makes large-scale mixed-media installations, sculptures, and prints informed by historical architecture, planned gardens, and native plants. Recent exhibitions include a long-term installation at The Bronx Children’s Museum, Dyckman Farmhouse Museum, Wassaic Project, Meta Open Arts, and MoCA Westport. Curatorial projects include; Building it Up to Tear it Down, Patterns of Power, No Nature, and Lucky to be Here. She received a 2021 SMFA/Tufts University Traveling Fellowship and holds an MFA in Printmaking and an MA in Art Education from The City University of New York.
Landscape is a language of power and myth. The images and installations I create are fantastical spaces where I act as architect, designer, engineer and project manager. Research focusing on gardens, natural landscapes, and architecture is as much about creating myths as it is about questioning who owns the land, who can preserve it, who can occupy it, and for how long. Constructing landscapes from ephemeral materials traces the rise and fall of the amassing of wealth and property - ultimately collecting reaches a zenith becoming unmanageable. The aftermath results in a deaccessioning or a fall to ruin. Spaces of grandeur are articulated through print media and digital means depicting a psychedelic chimera of antiquity and nature, a fever dream of landscaped grand hotels, private estates, and planned gardens.
I primarily use scientific collections, museum open-access archives, and auction catalogs to collect source material. This analog and digital process includes transforming incomplete images, adding or enhancing degraded images, and using digital collage systems to create new imagery from a sparsity of information. Within this process is the freedom to become a mythmaker and fabulist, taking one image, and recontextualizing it away from provenance, collections, museum archives, or ownership. Artworks are further prioritized for the people through translation into print media, reproducible, modular, and compactable, ready to adapt to any space and purpose.
In creating mythical landscapes, I translate garden statuary, architecture, plants, and animals in hyper-saturated colors and use pattern and repetition to conjure an impossible fleeting slipstream of the American landscape, a reckoning of its promise, limitations, and mythology.