Habitat: Explorations
Stephanie Sydney
MOAH:CEDAR
August 13 - October 23, 2022
As global warming and climate change continue to wreak havoc on the earth’s ecosystem, Los Angeles-based artist, Stephanie Sydney, examines the behaviors and attitudes of human nature and their direct contribution to the destruction and decay of the natural world. Through her carefully constructed digital collages, she combines her knowledge of painting and digital design. These collages are created through the use of Photoshop where she manipulates and layers images on top of one another. Through this layering of images, Sydney examines her fascination with the idea of juxtaposition between extreme concepts like life and death, strength and fragility, chaos and order, among others.
Originally trained as a painter, Sydney views her photography as a canvas and Photoshop as her paintbrush, using the program to manipulate the size, color, and shape of her chosen images. The result reveals a surrealist interpretation of reality whose visual associations compel the viewers to question the relationship between the individual images and the overall message presented. These optic explorations of the natural world and urban blight reconstruct her spontaneous snapshots of everyday life into a meaningful investigation into the effects of global warming.
Stephanie Sydney is a London-born artist who currently resides in Venice, California. She works in several media including mixed media, assemblage sculpture, installation, performance art, photography, digital, and digital collages. Her work is in several collections including Banque BNP Paribas and Morgan Stanley in New York. She has had solo exhibitions at Brand Library Art Gallery in Glendale, California; Gallery 825 in Los Angeles; Crafton Hills College Art Gallery in Yucaipa, California; and Villa di Donato in Naples, Italy. Sydney’s work has also been shown at Gallery FotoNostrum, Barcelona, Spain; and Raleigh Towers in Los Angeles, California; Launch LA and the Korean Cultural Center, Los Angeles, California; Site: Brooklyn Gallery, New York; San Diego Museum of Art, and BG Gallery in Bergamot Station, Santa Monica, California.