her best shot. Sydney was born in Alabama, reared in Western New York, and educated in Ithaca, New
York. She studied fine arts and art history at Cornell University, earning a B.F.A. in painting, as well as a
B.A. in art history. Upon graduation last year, Sydney moved to Boston, where she now lives and works.
She would love to be able to give a concise description of her current employment situation; however, she
regrets to inform the reader that no one has provided her with one. At any given point in her workday,
Sydney wears a multitude of hats: personal assistant, illustrator, secretary, nanny, personal chef. . . the
list is seemingly endless. Quite honestly, she'd tell you that she's a painter before she's any one of the
aforementioned descriptive nouns.
Though Sydney finds it difficult to write about her birthplace and employment situation, she is never at a
loss for words when it comes to her art. The following paragraphs comprise her personal statement;
these statements bring her work to life better than any biographical information ever could.
I aim to create art that is critically engaged with the culture in which I live. My largest artistic influence,
Pop Art, consists of art that extracts aspects of our culture only to throw them back in our faces. It is the
transformation from the benign—the subjects of our selective cultural blindness—to the malignant that
characterizes my fascination with Pop Art. I want to create images that question assumptions, and I intend
my paintings to render viewers uncomfortable once they begin questioning their assumptions.
Having also majored in art history, I am fascinated by the ways in which imagery profoundly influences the
psychological perceptions of a culture. My artistic research is focused upon the contemporary exploitation
of eroticised innocence as a marketing tool. Within media sources as varied as Vogue and Nickelodeon
magazine, pre-pubescent girls are portrayed as simultaneously sexually vulnerable and available, while
women masquerade as young girls—naïve and submissive. I am currently interested in what E.V. Day
describes as the employment of humor as “a tool of critique;” I believe that smirking best intensifies
cringing. My work is evolving to stand as deadpan re-presentations of the cultural fetishes marketed to
very young girls, darkly humorous views of the eroticised chimeras to which young girls look for
inspiration. I am working to create comedic objects that possess what David Robbins describes as an
“aggressive, belligerent relation to reality.”
The flat, graphic style in which I execute my paintings references the oversimplified images and candy-like
colors characteristic of comic book art and Disney animation; a method of rendering images intended to
simultaneously distill and amplify reality for consumption by children. It is a style that leaves little to the
imagination, not unlike the images from which I choose to work.
