BIO

Sylvia Rack studied and worked professionally as a digital character animator in video games until 2015 when she decided to move to Florence, Italy to study the techniques of old master painting. After returning to Canada in 2019 she began volunteering with several environmental organizations including For Our Kids, Mère au Fronts, Puppets for the Planet and the David Suzuki Butterfly Rangers, which began a lifelong fascination with ecosystem function and symbiotic relationships between plants, insects and soil.

She is completing her second year at Concordia’s MFA Painting and Drawing Program. She currently interns at the David Suzuki Foundation organizing community engagement for the Rewilding Arts Collective, and volunteers with the MFA Studio Arts Student Association to fundraise and organize. She has received several awards in the last few years including an Our Kids Climate Microgrant, the Lillian Vineberg Graduate Award, the Experimental Learning Grant and the Elspeth McConnell Fine Arts Internship Award.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My practice explores the alchemy of resistance and re-enchantment. My work expands from painting and drawing into community organizing and mobilization. I’m interested in creating spaces, both physical and mental spaces, that can restore our connection with the land. I evoke the relationships of wilderness, not simply by static depictions of the natural world, but through investigating the kaleidoscopic possibilities of Nature’s entanglements with modernity. I depict overlooked but integral microcosms of nature. The scenes paint the relationships between lichen, fungi, soil and insects and the human detritus that we leave as interlopers in the world of nature.

I incorporate materials and concepts used in the commodification of nature; appropriating microplastics and chemical reactions to create texture and color. These living pieces gesture towards the porous and on-going relationship between nature and humanity. My glistening worlds ask us to look, and look again, at the complex interactions of species, soil and psyche and to question and consider humanity’s dual fear and fascination with “the wild.”