SPARKLEMOJI

Sydney Joslin-Knapp is a 22-year-old from Dayton, Ohio. She’s lucky to have been immersed in creativity all of her life—she graduated from Stivers School for the Arts, earned a Photographic Technologies Certificate from Sinclair College, and completed a BFA in Studio Art and a minor in African American Studies at Ohio University. On a regular day, it’s likely you’ll catch her crafting at a coffee shop or making art with live flowers at your local grocery store. Sydney loves to use art and writing as means to meet new people, celebrate cool things, and pick apart the layers of experience and circumstance that influence how we all move through life.

From the Artist:

My work focuses on all of the circumstances, forces, and people who undergird our lives. I concentrate on their meanings while making my work—what is it that connects me to these subjects? Why? What other associations can I uncover through the process of re-making, re-living, and paying homage? How do others relate to these things? What are the implications of what we see and do? These meditations, and the pieces that result from them, are a core part of how I work my way through life. 

I use many materials from my childhood. Cardboard, construction paper, printer paper, washable markers, and acrylic paint are mainstays, sometimes accented by old sewing supplies from my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. This return to childhood media is an effort to draw on shared experience, since most people have worked with these materials at some point in their lives. Material familiarity, coupled with subject matter that incorporates pop cultural references and everyday objects, makes discussing deeper personal meanings a little easier, meaningful interactions more likely. Ultimately, I want to celebrate life’s beauty. The people and things that bring light to our darkest days deserve all the shout outs in the world. These works are the summations of my own love, and I hope to find new and better ways to express it in the future.

This body of work focuses on the struggle within surroundings. In many of these works the idea of a "surrounding" comes into question. The depiction of nature can be a conceptual stand-in for a variety of things, the historical battle between abstraction and figuration, the relationship between the artist and viewer or the struggle of humanity in an image saturated culture.