Bio

Jay Sylvester spent his youth exploring the forests and fields of New England, assembling complicated, mildly dangerous forts and secret shelters for his friends. This primitive world-building set him on an artistic path that would bear fruit years later. Studying at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in the 80s, he shifted his focus to the urban landscape around him, finding inspiration and materials in the cast-off ephemera and detritus of the city.

Coming full circle, Sylvester now lives and works in his studio on rural Long Island where he sources materials and inspiration from nature, including Bittersweet, Honeysuckle, Wisteria and Black Elder Vines. These species that Sylvester weaves into his assemblages might suggest pleasant references to Walt Whitman or other American nature poets. But the pieces’ titles reveal more epic and saga-inflected concerns: Leviathan, Ragnarok, American Icarus. And indeed the artist’s practice and product continually reference the timeless existential complexity of the relationship between man and the surrounding natural world: the love and the struggle, the dynamics of survival, the tension between oneness and separateness, and the endless beauty and overwhelming grandeur of it.

But Sylvester’s practice also suggests an episode of poiesis, a wished-for reconciliation, a possible denouement of detente between the seemingly unresolvable problems and dichotomies we face. Perhaps the epic will avoid a tragic end. Perhaps there will be integration instead of destruction, marriage instead of death: a healing next chapter in the narrative of our stay amid the splendor and travail of the earth.