This installation draws imagery from the Kangxi Chinese blue and white porcelain from the Hudson River Museum’s historic home, Glenview, and additional Gilded Age collections. Fabulism, blended with a critical view of Gilded Age wealth and excess, presents a maximalist room enveloped in chaos. Design motifs, freed from porcelain cups and vases, surround an upturned parlor, mirroring the excess, greed, and corruption of the Gilded Age and the political instability of the early Qing Dynasty. Transitional, or Jingdezhen, porcelain was produced during the shift from the Ming to the Qing dynasty, a period marked by civil war and political turmoil. As a result, the traditional system of large-scale production for the imperial court collapsed, and leading officials in charge of ceramic production turned to private customers, including foreign trading companies. While both historical periods are praised for their marked aesthetics and production of beautiful, grand objects, they equally share a history of political strife and social upheaval.

Responding to the history of agriculture and dairy production in Wassiac and Amenia, printed magnet sheet transform a steel molasses tank. The arches present an idyllic folly, one that romanticizes the myth of the American pastoral. The plants refer to the recent past; beets were grown in the production of sugar and molasses. Flowering cowslip is a visual pun alluding to the massive dairy industry and the path of the milk train to NYC, whose tracks lay a few feet past the tank.

All images courtesy of Jenna Bascom

Coinciding with the return of the cicadas after a seventeen-year hibernation, this site-specific installation also marks a downturn in the COVID infection rates and the beginning of summer. The enclosed space allows visitors a place of sanctuary and respite. Woven in the dense foliage are hundreds of paper cicadas. The title is taken from the Maria Elena Walsh song Como La Ciggara whose lyrics poetically describe resiliency in the face of severe adversity.

Site-specific installation at Bronx Children’s Museum

The numerous plants, animals, and fish making the Bronx River their home are sometimes difficult to see. This installation uses a form of printmaking called screen-printing to reproduce the lush river environment. Black light is used to make the invisible, visible, illuminating the often unseen yet vibrant wildlife. American lady, viceroy, and eastern tiger swallowtail butterflies hover above burdock flowers. Sunfish, alewives, and mummichog swim in the currents. Painted turtles sun themselves along the riverbank while wood ducks, an egret, a black cormorant, and gray tree frogs weave in and out of the dense green canopy. While the varied forms of life along the river are well hidden, patience and a keen eye can learn to spot even the most camouflaged wildlife.

Site-specific installation, 2019

Sunroom Project Space, Wave Hill

Rachel Sydlowski creates an installation addressing history and the natural world in Wave Hill’s Sunroom. Parlor in the Wilderness comprises layers of historical wallpaper that serve as background for complex, screen-print collages of flora and fauna, architectural details and decorative motifs from Wave Hill, Inwood Hill Park and other surrounding green spaces in New York. Freestanding in the space are decorative objects made by Sydlowski and a wrought-iron, circular bench. Her project transforms the room into a collage of the past and present—a reconstruction and reinterpretation of traditional histories based on her research.

The color palette from the west to north walls of the Sunroom ranges from yellow to green to blue, addressing successive time periods. The yellow wall depicts prehistoric plants while the yellow-green wall focuses on agriculture, specifically corn, squash and climbing beans—three main crops of indigenous peoples in North America. The darker-green wall portrays rare plants and their aesthetic beauty, and the blue (north) wall features a contemporary environment filled with invasive and native plant species. Forms and details of Wave Hill’s architectural features, as well as flora and fauna in various stages of growth and decay, are emphasized as part of each wall’s tableau.

Investigating America’s ecological and architectural histories, Sydlowski focuses on its changing landscape and its excesses, failures and rapid growth. In urban areas, cultivated gardens and public parks are accepted as nature—spaces for contemplation, meditation and escape. In this “domesticated nature,” Sydlowski blurs the lines between familiar and unfamiliar, fact and fiction.

Organized by Curator of Visual Arts Eileen Jeng Lynch, the Sunroom Project Space provides an opportunity for New York-area emerging artists to develop a site-specific project to exhibit in a solo show.

Hummelland or Small Acts of Resistance places Hummel figurines in fantastical compositions free from their normalized cultural context such as the curio-cabinet, mantlepiece, or as objects of kitsch. Interested in the mindset of the collector and the historical enthusiasms surrounding porcelain, artist Rachel Sydlowski investigates the origins of Hummel figurines. The experiential synthesis of viewing Hummel collections in private homes and the novel Utz by the British writer Bruce Chatwin guided this collection of digital collages that recontextualize porcelain figurines in quixotic dreamscapes with saturated colors, sacred geometry, lush gardens, and forests.

Behind the cheerful uncanniness of these nostalgic collectibles hides a complex history of faith, rebellion, and hope. Hummels are the invention of Sister Maria Innoctia Hummel, a German nun who initially drew the ire of Adolf Hitler in 1933 for her painting The Volunteers. She continued incorporating imagery like the Star of David into her drawings and figurines until her order was forcibly closed. The artist comments, “I find Hummels both intriguing and repelling. They seem strange in their sweet and overly optimistic poses. I imagine each figurine has an intricate backstory, a personal history, and a contextual history as an object of material culture. I wanted to know more about the conditions that supported the manufacture of these fanciful figurines in an enduring material like porcelain. The Hummel collection and the book Utz by Bruce Chatwin share some commonalities. Utz is the story of a mad collector, his obsession with porcelain intertwined with the myth of the Golem set in post-war Europe. Like M.I. Hummel, who rebelled through kitsch and craft, the fictional character Utz is a bit of a rebel too, but in a completely different way. He refuses to relinquish his priceless collection of Meissen figurines to a totalitarian state. He goes to comically absurd lengths to protect the Meissen figurines by creating a sanctuary for the collection within his cramped apartment. The explicit Hummel collection and the imaginary or implicit Meissen collection of Utz speak to the alchemical qualities of the porcelain figurine. I construct fabulist landscapes and alternate realities for these objects through digital renderings. Additionally, Utz and Hummel figurines sublimate objects of kitsch into acts of rebellion, which is incredibly interesting since the objects seem utterly benign in their static state.”

Dissemination of Hummels into the homes of thousands of collectors globally was a collective gesture for post-war peace, even while the uncommon circumstances of the maker were in a perpetual state of erasure. Ultimately the sublimation of porcelain kitsch objects in this exhibition is a re-examination of small acts of rebellion and dissent. Resistance exists in many forms including joy, folly, and idealism.

Serigraphs, wallpaper

2018

This paper installation describes a non-linear history of Inwood Hill Park, focusing on native plants, wildlife and architecture.

Using decorative arts and floral patterns, this screenprinted installation invokes the excesses of the opulent minority. Visual harmony is created through the monochromatic color scheme while the maximalist pairing of collage with a profusion of patterns blurs the line between the familiar and unfamiliar. Alluring and uncanny, it hangs in the balance between a state of decay and emergent nature.

Penn State HUB Robeson Gallery
2021

This large-scale installation presents a fantastical vivarium, a rarefied collection of birds and plants for study and aesthetic reflection. Thousands of hand-printed serigraphs are collaged together to create a fabricated wilderness where birds have adapted to the controlled environment; nesting in unlikely places, displaying their plumage and pageantry in a truncated and finite space. Beauty is cautionary in this miniaturized depiction of an Edenic microcosm. Lotus flowers repeat throughout the composition referring equally to Lotus-Eaters and symbolism of rebirth, enlightenment, and perseverance. Greenery stretches and impossibly cantilevers creating a balance that cannot be sustained, its success will also be its undoing.

Kono Bairei’s 19th-century collection of bird paintings, vintage botanical illustrations, and large garden urns are all part of the complex dialog of images originally sourced from open-access collections and auction catalogs. Taken out of their original contexts and transformed through a series of indirect processes related to the act of reproducibility and printmaking, the representations of birds mirror dire shifts of habitat and migration in the wake of industrialization.

Rachel Sydlowski and Marquise Foster

Screenprint collage, hand printed upholstery, vintage chairs and table, acrylic paint, cardboard, UV-A light

Ceremonial Clothing by Marquise Foster
Gown; black embroidered lace with small crystals throughout the gown and gloves
Suit; black heavy shin satin cotton paired with a white high neck cotton shirt and a pair of high waist satin cotton pants

In Assembly of Ciphers at the Dyckman Farmhouse Museum, I intervene with the architectural space of the front parlor to challenge and reframe the historical narrative of this space. Once a leisure area for the Dyckman family, this room is transformed into a space that honors and recognizes the lives of enslaved peoples from Upper Manhattan—specifically those enslaved by the Dyckman family. The work serves as a meditation on the complexities of history and the ways in which spaces, objects, and structures can hold untold stories that demand to be uncovered. How can we truly know the past? How do we connect with those who lived before us? Assembly of Ciphers forces the viewer to confront these questions, positioning them as active participants in unearthing fragments of history and interpreting a cryptic code.

False artifacts replace some of the existing furniture, and decorative elements of the farmhouse, replacing the portraits of the Dyckman family with UV-A sensitive images, and placing ceremonial and mourning garments—an elegant formal dress and suit created by Marquise Foster within the parlor disrupts the authority of the Dyckman family. These garments, presented as "false artifacts" in the context of the Dyckman home, serve to collapse the boundaries between the past and present, blending historical memory with contemporary reinterpretation. The clothing acts as both a symbol of loss and a marker of resistance, suggesting the presence of lives and histories that were once silenced.

The room is further transformed with cobalt blue prints of native and medicinal plants, connecting directly with the delft tiles that decorate the hearth—a pastoral motif that echoes the comfort and economic power of the Dyckman family’s life, while simultaneously highlighting the natural resources that sustained both the wealthy and the enslaved. Hidden beneath this aesthetic layer, I add a layer of invisible ultraviolet imagery: native plants from the lands of the enslaved, excerpts from historical documents, and the names of enslaved individuals, all encoded in an ultraviolet medium. To reveal these hidden traces of history, viewers must engage with the space using a blacklight or UV-A lantern. This method of revelation forces the viewer to actively search for and uncover the past, making the act of discovering these concealed histories an intimate, participatory experience.

The chairs that form a circle in the center of the parlor are symbolic of an assembly or meeting space—an invitation for viewers to engage in a collective reflection and conversation. The act of sitting in this space, once a place of leisure for the Dyckman family, now becomes a space for reckoning and contemplation, where the legacies of enslavement and resistance come into focus.

By activating the space, Assembly of Ciphers asks visitors to reconsider the lives of those who were enslaved and the histories that were erased or overlooked. Rather than restoring lost histories, this work creates a space for the viewer to inhabit the parlor and engage directly with the past. The complex code of history is activated in the present moment, creating an opportunity for reflection and dialogue. In this way, the installation does not merely present a historical narrative, but empowers the viewer to be a part of the process of uncovering and interpreting that narrative. In doing so, the act of being present in the space, engaging with the past, and reflecting on it, becomes a step toward creating a more just and informed future—a future that acknowledges the untold histories and seeks to right the wrongs of the past

Keeping Room part of the three artist exhibition OASIS
ChaShama’s Space to Connect
Fordham Plaza 2020 Window Exhibitions
Curator: Laura James

Keeping rooms date back to Colonial times. The keeping room, located directly off the kitchen, was also the warmest room in the house. By day, families gathered here to do indoor chores, and by night would sleep there during the colder seasons. This functionality engenders social engagement and the keeping room is not only a place to stay warm but a place for friends and family to gather. A staple of early American vernacular architecture this printed version of a keeping room also serves as a vanitas.

Vanitas still lifes are often appreciated for their visual appeal and for their deeper philosophical meaning. Although at first sight this casual assortment of objects may seem random, but each is selected with care and purpose. The fire, teacup and flowers, all speak to the ephemeral quality of life; the clock on the fireplace mantel symbolizes the passing of time; the ornately carved and upholstered furniture represent the fleeting nature of temporal power; and the citrus fruits signify the futility of monetary pursuits. Native plants, hummingbirds and flying insects support and frame the interior composition indicating the need for balance between the aims of human progress and the natural world.

At the nexus of several transportation lines on Fordham Road, Keeping Room presents a quiet sanctuary away from the noise and complexities of modernity, a mnemonic prompt for reflection, spiritual balance and finding beauty in unlikely places.

Paper Garden

Serigraphs on backing paper, LED lights

Installation, dimensions variable

2014

Using a matrix of screen printed images this installation presents an ephemeral version of Untermyer Park. Printed versions of plants, garden architecture and decorative objects transform unlikely spaces into elaborate paper garden. The conceptual border and lack of framing create an experience blurring the lines between authenticity and myth. The uncanny illusion of a natural environment, contrasted with the authentic nature of outdoors, is similar to our relationship with public parks in urban areas. We allow ourselves to enjoy the wildness of the seemingly undeveloped areas of urban parks. Yet, urban parks have been carefully constructed to elicit an experience of being in wilderness. Bringing a printed version of the garden to interior architectural spaces is similar to our relationship with parks in urban environments. This project aims to bring a facsimile of an outdoor garden inside creating a dialog between the interior and exterior.