Sylvie Mayer

Lives and works in Providence, R.I., USA

Artist statement

Preoccupied with thresholds and in-between states, I depict spaces that mediate between public and private. Through layered translucent washes that build toward opacity, my paintings explore interiority and impermanence. I work from found images and objects such as props and costumes, whose gaps and absences invite re-imagination. Through cropping, recontextualizing, and repainting, I revive these overlooked materials. I also collaborate with performers in my studio, rehearsing and reenacting scenes that become sources for painting. The theatre provides both a structure and a metaphor for my approach to painting. Having grown up backstage at the ballet company where my mother worked, I became attuned to the divide between what is seen and what is hidden. Curtains, mirrors, and dressing rooms recur as visual devices that heighten this tension between revelation and concealment. Like stagecraft, painting creates illusion while exposing its own seams, translating the suspended disbelief of performance into painted space. Time is embedded in my practice materially, technically, and conceptually. Paint accumulates slowly in layers, drawing on historical methods, while my sources—from early photography to digital video to live performance—reflect shifting perceptions of time across eras. My work is less about depicting specific histories than about staging encounters with time itself: its passage, layering, and inherent instability. Repetition is central to my process. I often...

Artwork