Feature Friday - Sylvia Rack
Name
Sylvia Rack
Pronouns
she/they
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 Prize, and volunteers with the MFA Studio Arts Student Association to fundraise and organize the annual MAUREEN exhibit for the MFA Studio Arts students. 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.
Instagram
@sylviarackartist
Website
www.sylviarack.com
Where in Montreal are you located?
In Mile End near Fairmount Bagels.
What do you love about your neighborhood?
I love the building I live in, it has a cult fascination surrounding it because it’s pink, and there is this weird, tiny store window that looks onto Fairmount ave. It was a jewelry store at one point when I was a small kid (my father bought the building in the 80s) but then for many years my Dad was obsessed with putting weird stuff in that front window on display. He had a collection of antique tea cans, a vintage Japanese doll that looked like it could be a haunted object, he owned a pet iguana for about 5 years and set up some branches in the front window so “Iggy” could bask in the sunlight. That little window has attracted a lot of curiosity.
What’s your favourite art space in Montreal and why?
La Sala Rosa. I was part of a show there about 10 years ago when I was singing in a Bulgarian choir, and I saw the Bread and Puppet theatre there last year, which was fantastic. I like how it has a grassroots vibe, it’s kind of old and ramshackle. I could see it as the setting in a novel where “the resistance” is planned.
Describe your art practice in your own words.
It's about how our society is turning nature into a commodity: land has value only when it becomes productive as collateral for credit to the bank.
It’s becoming harder to recognize the existence of a logic other than that of capitalist development. We hear about them clear-cutting old growth forests and we have this feeling it’s really bad, but then some corporation gives us this confusing justification for it which seems to make sense. I noticed the same logic is being applied to destroying healthcare and free education and cheap daycare. The destruction of ecosystems is entangled with the eradication of community and social support in our own lives.
Everyone like money, but the problem is capitalism can’t exist without things like soil healthy enough to produce food, a functioning ecosystem and the unpaid domestic labor of caregivers: people who are taking care of their family or friends. There’s all these invisible relationships within the ecosystem that echo the invisible things we do for each-other that make life worth living.
For example canopy-dwelling plants and lichens collect nitrogen and nutrients from rain, mist, and dust and disperse those nutrients to the trees. I was surprised to learn that soil in the rainforest floor is actually quite poor and in fact most of the nutrients that the ecosystem needs are collected in branch-dwelling mosses and arboreal soil.
My dad is losing his memory and I’m now taking care of him, he lives in the apt below ours so he comes up to have meals with us and I clean for him and manage his finances. Because of my relationship with him we live in this awesome neighborhood with very cheap rent. It's the main reason I can exist as an artist, this relationship of mutual aid. It’s like the lichen and the trees.
What mediums do you work with?
This past year I’ve been experimenting with a transient mixture of synthetic materials and oil paint, I’m calling it Materia Symbiote.
It’s an assemblage of paint, organic detritus like hair, insect wings, feathers, and microplastics: glitter and glitzy single-use products associated with magic, beauty and desire. It references the commodification of nature: how the meaning of words like magic, spell and glamour used to express the power of the cosmos and the body, but now are limited to superficialities and consumerism.
I’m also incorporating pigments and images from chemical reactions on copper and soil chromatography. In this way I’m giving a bit more agency to nature, the reactions appear and change over time based on their exposure to light and air.
Describe your current project.
Right now I'm collaborating with fibres artist Emilie O’Brien and GHG-Montreal Project; a multidisciplinary group of researchers based at McGill University that are building a city-level picture of the spatial distribution of methane gas leaks in the Greater Montreal area: https://ghg-montreal.meteo.mcgill.ca/map/ These leaks are concentrated around converted landfills and faulty gas lines, and occur unproportionately in low income neighborhoods.
We are using the photographic processes of soil chromatography and botanical cyanotypes in combination with embroidery and collage to make visible the invisible methane gas leaks. Soil chromatography is a simple test anyone can do to measure soil health, the hues and patterns show things like microbial health and anaerobic activity.
It’s a call for action. There’s ways the city could manage the ecology of these areas to absorb most of the methane. If the sites adopted good soil building practices and got the soil carbon levels up to 15% most of the emissions would be absorbed by the soil and the trees. Oddly enough soil actually becomes healthier and more productive when it has a higher percentage of carbon.
Where do you find your inspiration?
Mainly from researching the bizarre, stranger than fiction relationships between insects, fungi and plants. I read this book last year “The Nature of Oaks” by Douglas Tallamy. It describes all the ecological relationships that develop around an oak tree over the course of a year. It is mind boggling. All the themes we have in our myths: immaculate conception, vampirism, changelings — it’s all there in the insect and fungi world, alive and flourishing.
I also get a lot of inspiration from my 7 year old daughter. She has this uncanny way of combining the artificial and the natural world seamlessly. We do a lot of gardening and nature walks but she’s also heavily inundated with consumerism on every front. Have you heard of a slime mixing video? It’s all the rage for kids TV. Basically it’s a video of a person mixing a bunch of glitzy plastic crap and makeup into a huge pile of slime. It’s disturbing but it’s also grotesquely fascinating. My daughter creates these sculptures every once in a while that are an assemblage of clay, plastic toys and glittery detritus. It was my inspiration for materia symbiote.
Describe your creative process.
It usually begins with an unexpected encounter with nature. For example I collected some acorns and brought them back to my studio and then I saw a tiny acorn weevil crawling out of one. Or once I was walking in downtown Toronto and suddenly stepped on this weird slippery elm branch in the perfect shape of a T. That will give me an idea, then I’ll be experimenting with materials in my studio and some really interesting visual texture will emerge that will look kind of like a slippery elm leaf or an acorn. So then I’ll merge the two ideas and create a painting from it.
What led you to pursue visual art?
I’ve always loved drawing, I actually studied animation but when I was at university the whole hand drawn industry was dying so I switched to computer animation. I worked in video games for about six years, but then one day the concept artist at my studio told me about this school in Italy that taught old master Renaissance style painting– the Angel Academy of Art, and within a year I had quit my job and was living in Italy. Best decision of my life.
Is there any medium you don’t currently work with, but would like to explore?
I just started learning how to make paper. I'm also interested in learning how to create bioplastic packaging.
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