Cydney Lewis | Flowing within the recesses | January 21 - March 2, 2024
Finding Grace Through Darkness, 2023, Hand cut paper, engraving, ink, paper, on plexiglass, 36 x 24 inches
The Riverside Arts Center’s Freeark Gallery is pleased to present Flowing Within the Recesses, a solo exhibition of collage and mixed media art by Cydney Lewis, curated by Joanne Aono.
Exhibition Dates: January 21 – March 2, 2024
Opening Reception: Sunday, January 21, 2024, 3:00 – 6:00 pm
Join us afterwards for a private happy hour across the street at the Quincy Street Distillery.
Gallery Hours: Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays 1:00 – 5:00 pm
Artist Talk: Saturday, February 10, 2024 at 2:00 pm
Cydney Lewis creates art that is both mysterious and familiar. Her collages of materials used in unconventional ways portray scenes of disruption and calm; tragedy and beauty; fear and reflection. Afrofuturism and its basis in Black history, science fiction, and fantasy lends to her story-filled depictions of the past, present, and future. She combines truncated images cut from magazines, discarded styrofoam packing, hand-knotted post-consumer plastic bags, rhinestones, and other objects. These are manipulated through repetitious markings made with paint, ink, and engraving. Lewis’s exhibition, Flowing Within the Recesses, at the Riverside Arts Center invokes otherworldly settings, encouraging us to find relations within the plantlike forms and the fragments of human bodies.
Self Sabotage, from the Beauty Amongst Darkness series, can be read as a confession to sweet indulgences or a cover to deep tragedy. The strawberry-topped cake is ensnarled with overstuffed fabric, a fancy neck scarf, and foil paper akin to candy wrappers. The resulting creature appears to be struggling to free itself. Finding Grace Through Darkness is seemingly an underwater scene. The muted engraved and inked repetitive marks on plexiglass create a somber yet calming tone, while the colorful hard-edged magazine cutouts create multiple interpretations. Is the periwinkle rope a safety line or a noose? Are the hands graceful in joy or desperately calling out for help? The open-ended stories allow us room for personal thoughts and emotions.
Lewis’s installation above/between/below was inspired by the recent discovery of a hidden landscape under the Antarctic ice; of hills and valleys carved by ancient rivers for millions of years. As an artist involved in dance, teaching, and architecture, Lewis uses space, material, color, movement, and form. The ancient flow of water over time is like the spatial movement of a dancer or an architect’s connection of rooms within a building’s design. Slick images from magazines are cropped in haunting ways while two-dimensional materials are folded, twisted, and stacked. These combined with found objects, create an illusion of three-dimensional space and invite us to wander into and reflect on our connection with the environment.
— Joanne Aono, curator
Self Sabotage, 2023, Hand cut paper, metal foil, cork, plastic, acrylic marker, 20 x 16 inches
Cydney Lewis is a Chicago-based Multimedia artist. She holds a BS in Architecture from the Univerisity of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, attended the L’École D’architecture de Versailles, France, and took further studies through the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Ballet and film add to her multidisciplinary background. Her art is held in private collections around the world and has been exhibited widely at venues including the Union League Chicago, Hyde Park Art Center and The Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art. She has received various honors, among them residencies with Chicago Public Schools and Lyseloth Musikerwohnhaus Basel, Switzerland, as well as awards including 3Arts Make A Wave and the Black Creativity/Green Art Award from the Museum of Science and Industry. Her art has been reviewed by Newcity, NBC Chicago, and Bad at Sports. Currently, she is a member of Tiger Strikes Asteroid of Chicago.
Flowing Downstream, 2023
Artist Statement
Walking through my community inspires me to imagine multidimensional landscapes created from everyday objects. These unconventional artifacts reflect the world we live in, consume, and fill with things. Printed material and imagery document our existence. Discarded objects reveal what (and who) our society values, and what gets thrown away. Through drawing, sculpture, and installation assembled around these materials, I discover their stories, their beauty, and endless adaptation. They create worlds that seem familiar and surreal.
My work imagines the places and spaces where the natural environment, the spiritual world, and manmade materials collide. I am drawn to the patterns of growth and renewal I find in nature, through drawing and collage, images and textures, and the stuff of our day-to-day life. Sometimes a drawing is layered upon a collage of images, paper, and cork; other times, I assemble or forge new landscapes from melted plastics and synthetics generated by our past and present. Stretching the boundaries of the form and materials until something – or someplace – new emerges.
Afrofuturism inspires who and what you see as the installations are portals to an immersive experience of Black life past, present, and future. I conjure and celebrate infinite Black existence, taking up space in reimagined and reconstructed territories. We must see ourselves in boundless multidimensional landscapes. It is part of who we are. It is liberation.
Pattern, repetition, and constant movement form the foundation of my work. By twisting, tearing, melting, and re-shaping, my hands are tools to reinvent the natural and human-made elements. As we increasingly lean toward artificial materials and intelligence, my practice honors something slow, meditative, and intentional. The layered and textured landscapes invite you to look closely, to slow down and discover the layers of materials, drawing and imagery. My intentions are to unite real human labor and real materials to motivate human connections.
— Cydney Lewis
