Lisa Sylvester is an artist based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania who uses a variety of materials to create text-based works. Most recently, Sylvester has employed paper, polyethylene, acrylic and granular glass to form large-scale grids of text that floats weightlessly across mapped surfaces. By infusing the backgrounds with either light or dark tones, Sylvester deconstructs lines of French literature and poetry and renders a play upon words, letterforms and pictorial illusion. For the artist, letters and words play a dual role; their associated meanings are signicant and become infused into each work, but also operate as visual elements, like color pixels, that are transformed through different types of combinations.

Chart (La Peste) (2011) consists of nine frames that measure 34-inches square and portray letters with cursive text that hover around dark etchings of fragmented nautical charts. Inspired by sections of text from Albert Camus’ novel The Plague, Sylvester positions symbols in volumetric fashion, suggesting landscape through the rendered impression of atmosphere and depth. The artist continues to explore the multilayered resonance of the grid motif in Love Scene With Numbers (2012) which features a gray and white mix of letters and numbers suspended over small, sepia-toned representations of maps. Two earlier pieces titled Brown Painting (Je Rame)(2009) and Green Row 2 (2010), stress the gravity inherent in background texture as literal words gradually emerge through the saturated surfaces of dark hues.

Since 1997 Lisa Sylvester has exhibited her art in numerous exhibitions throughout Pennsylvania and Delaware. In 2006, the Mangel Gallery (Philadelphia, PA) hosted a solo show titled Lisa Sylvester: Paintings. In 2009, the artist appeared in New Talent, a group show that took place at Philadelphia’s Rosenfeld Gallery. In 2012, Sylvester showed her work at LGTripp Gallery, also in Philadelphia (Lisa Sylvester: Text Essential). Sylvester’s art has appeared in Maps at the Pagus Gallery (2012) and in two group exhibitions at Philadelphia’s Bridgette Mayer Gallery (2010, 2013). Her work will be shown in Say at The Art Trust in West Chester, PA and in a faculty exhibition at Delaware College of Art + Design in Wilmington.