Sydney Swisher

b. 1994 Olney, Illinois

Sydney Swisher is a self-taught painter from southern Illinois that specializes in oil on fabric paintings. In an era defined by technological acceleration, her work explores the intersections of memory, materiality, and machine intelligence. By uploading family film photos with descriptions of childhood memories, she uses AI to generate familiar yet digitally fabricated spaces. The scenes are then further digitally collaged with pieces of real spaces and painted into thrifted fabric, sometimes with thrifted embellishments sewn-in. Her process mirrors the way generative technology, and memory, build through layers of what came before. Her work explores the continuous re-writing and quiet unease of generated images reinterpreting our collective memory.

These scenes that are specific to no one evoke collective nostalgia and probe the evolving nature of a future filled with false images of the past. They are an inquiry into how images remember for us, and what is lost in that exchange.