Rachel Sydlowski

Using printmaking as a primary medium I make large-scale installations, collages, and sculptures. Modular matrices printed on paper cover existing architecture, creating illusionary spaces with wallpapers, furniture, decorative objects, flora, and fauna. Well suited to mimicry and duplication, screenprinting is used to its maximalist effect. Installations consist of hundreds or thousands of discrete prints on paper.

History, truth, and duplication are closely intertwined, in that what is repeated is often accepted as fact. Informed by American history, I construct large-scale installations, recreating objects and spaces with pattern and decorativeness. Through varied processes, I construct sculptural spaces with the flourish of a fabulist. Fact and fiction are exchanged for myth and the uncanny. In these dream-like maximalist constructions, material culture and artifacts of excess are made impermanent through illusionary, light, and ephemeral materials. Beauty, decoration, and excessiveness exist in the most fleeting and humble materials, a gesture that acknowledges a desire to deconstruct and examine systems of power and a culture of extremes.

Herbert H. Lehman College, The City University of New York, MFA, Printmaking
The City College of New York, The City University of New York, MA, Art Education
School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University, BFA