Jeff Sylvester

Edmonton artist is fascinated by flocks of birds.

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If you’ve seen a large flock of starlings swoop and swirl like a celestial spirograph in the evening sky, you’ll know you’ve experienced grace. It’s easy to think of their coordinated flight as dancing, or even an expression of pure joy.

The phenomenon is called murmuration, a wonderful word that evokes the swoosh of avian  acrobatics. Scientists aren’t entirely sure why the birds do it, but theories abound – everything from avoiding predators to generating warmth before roosting and sharing information about feeding sites.

While it might seem best to capture murmurations on video, Edmonton artist Jeff Sylvester has been painting them for a couple of years.

“I find them very intriguing and mysterious,” he says.

The works in his show, Sum of Its Parts, on view at Edmonton’s Front Gallery from April 25 to May 15, don’t so much capture the essence – fluid movement – as they trigger memory.

Seen digitally, Sylvester’s paintings, particularly the ones with leafless trees, have a retro graphic quality reminiscent of Christmas cards from decades past, a sensibility born from his love of vintage screenprint posters from the ’30s and ’40s.

He paints them, layer upon layer, using low-tack masking tape to block out different forms, and then adds a layer of clear epoxy before painting another layer.

Sylvester, who co-owns the graphic design studio where he works when he isn’t marking art or caring for his three children, says digital images don’t do his work justice.

What isn’t apparent looking at them online is how they gleam. This complicates their reading. There’s a tension between an image that evokes the tactility of a print and the final coat of shiny epoxy.

“It can get quite heavy," he says. "But it adds dimension.” 

Thematically, the flocks of birds symbolize human communities and how we become something greater as a group than we are as individuals.

But Sylvester is also thinking about how our sense of community is changing under the influence of digital technology and the complexities of social media.

Some images in the show include communications towers, a more overt gesture to the theme. ■

Sum of Its Parts is on view at the Front Gallery in Edmonton from April 25 to May 15, 2019.