Copyright 2022 Sylvie Covey
Current Work
I started making art as a printmaker, painter and photographer. Today I mostly work from digital photography combined with photo techniques in printmaking. I create to transcend reality, and now digital art allows me unlimited transformations in color, surfaces and dimensions.
The Portfolios
I am spending some months upstate New York. I look closely at the ground and the fields around me. The colors of Spring and Summer consume me. I observe myriads of botanical species, conveying different moods and emotions.
From solitary trees I moved onto creating imaginary forests, with accumulations of branches and multiple trees, and a variety of bold animals. I wanted to convey the vast diversity of life forms inhabiting our forests. The forests are a metaphor of our mind.
I see Trees as a metaphor of the human condition. We are both unique and infinite in our existence and culture, growing, fighting for, or sharing earth, sun and water. Like humans, trees depend on good land, strong will and luck of circumstances to survive and live long in our universe.
I learned how to make botanical prints when I spent a year upstate NY during the 2020/2021 pandemic. I was fascinated in discovering the chemical reactions of plants loaded with tannin. As a lifelong printmaker, it was a revelation to print without any ink. I used only the natural tannin of plants steamed with various mordanted paper and fabrics.
In this series I imagined places where the earth fuses into space. I was inspired by the vastness and variety of the world, and by the knowledge that we live a very short time in an unlimited universe. I like to think there is no end in the atmosphere, but a continuity of other dimensions. Space becomes abstract, depth is vertiginous, and colors are ambiguous.
I imagined myself in the ocean, floating and swimming with sea creatures, in a whim to transcend reality, dimensions and surfaces. I was looking for a world where senses are exalted, colors real or not, a world where we are infinite, where the air, the mountains and the ocean are one.
I photographed my friends Laura and Danielle over the years, and used portraits of myself as well, to convey the multiple aspects of our sensual bodies.
“Nudes with Trees” started with the “Tree Hands” series, where I saw the branches of trees becoming blood vessels, and growing into deeper ramifications, with the vessels of life running throughout our entire body to rejoin earth.
I created Reflections to show the many aspects of life we can observe and absorb. By digitally changing colors and light, I wanted to give a different viewpoint of nature in a surreal atmosphere. These photographs were taken mostly upstate New York and in Cape May, New Jersey.
I travelled to Wyoming to photograph Yellowstone. It was an epic adventure in the wilderness, and the last trip I shared with my late husband Shan. The result was the creation of “Elegy”, a series of digital prints exhibited in midtown Manhattan in 2010. (Lobby Gallery of 1155 Avenue of the Americas, NYC.)
Utah was my Land of Imagine, where I explored places of heart and soul fused together. Utah, where one may envision a world in layers of true and imagined colors and dimensions.
Eros is an on-going series pursuing self-erotica and erotic subjects. I work with nudity and erotic subjects to portray what we are not supposed to see.
Following the Meetings series but in a broader scale, the She-Mountain series was to merge a woman’s body with landscapes and mountains, as to search and recognize one’s strong place in the world.
The She-River series was created to merge a woman’s body in rivers and rushing waters, as to recognize our ephemeral lightness of being.
I live in Time Square, the center of a city bursting with energy. This series started with an invitation by artist Stephen Fredericks to participate in his project “A Day in Times Square”, and resulted in a portfolio of prints by twelve artists, acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2009 in New York.
The Baths and Showers series came upon the idea of exploring the notions of privacy versus exposure. I am interested in capturing moments of privacy with a certain esthetic visual quality.
The Veils and Ropes series was created to approach the subjects of concealment, appearance, performance, bondage, limitations, and passages.
I developed “Meetings” as a series of monochrome photo etchings and photo emulsions that combine and merge images of the body of a woman with urban and nature settings. This series was to address our identity versus the place we are at, and the choices of one’s assertion and recognition.