Hello, I'm Orchid.

Orchid Sylvester is a multidisciplinary artist and designer navigating the intersections of analog, digital, and virtual spaces. While her practice investigates the forensics of memory, Sylvester's interest in design stems from her sensitivities to art as praxis. She believes design is a medium of empathy, and to be a designer means to address needs unrecognized by the general consciousness. Sylvester's explorations in fabrication and time-consciousness not only analogizes publisher and press to zeitgeist and propaganda, but renders the mimetics of her work as legitimized entities.

"Virtuality is a recognition of converted states. Dreaming is virtual reality; so is play. Authorship is the virtuality of divinity. Engaging with virtuality requires grappling systems and processes, such as ethnographic encryptions, ejection, and agency towards personhood. The transcience of virtuality renders design and story as extensions of contextualized humanity." Archive as evidence through the reader as testimony and mechanization as limb straddles Sylvester's work in dichonomies of analog/digital states and virtuality. Through the realization of body as both translation and machine to the referential nature of sequential art as visual narrative, Sylvester's practice exemplifies the spectrum of virtuality as the forensics of memory.

"There is an aspect of the metropolis/urban that is unfairly degraded as corporate and congested in contrast to the individualistic Americana of suburbia. I notice a similar parallel to fine arts in contrast to design as craft and industrial arts. I navigate ekistics as metaphor for my engagement with format in my artistic work. My celebration of metropolis/city is industrious and referential; it is an amalgamation of diaspora, of a longing for home in all forms, and of the people and movements who are, were, and will be. It is important for me to consider the cultural, social, and vocational relationships artists have to their communities because art is a catalyst for change. Design and craft are echoes of cities as they are curated for everyone; craft does so materially, while design does so contextually. In the way artists of various fields informed my engagements with the people around me, fortifying my ability to critically research, communicate, and be an advocate for equity, I believe in accessible knowledge through art, design, craft, and social practice."

// For an exhaustive list of artistic experiences and affiliations, go to CV.

Born from a Caribbean diaspora, Orchid Sylvester began life in a multifaceted climate. Conscious of the cultural and material visages from her childhood shifting with economic and environmental changes, Sylvester developed an interest in art as a form of storytelling. Her interest in sequential art and systems contextualizes the rhizomatc nature of her work. Such a basis was the foundation that enabled her to earn a BFA at The Cooper Union, where she took courses in Industrial Design, Graphic Design, Audiovisual, and New Media. She not only earned the Full Tuition Merit Scholarship and Service to the School of Art Award, but is a recipient of the Rhoda Lubalin Fellowship. Galvanized by the media surrounding the US invasion of Grenada, her proposal, Utopia, tenderly reclaims and satirizes the fetishistic nature of tourism through the authentication of transient ephemera. Cooper Union is where she became acclimated with design and desired to explore its many disciplines in the form of fabrication and craft, but she has not abandoned her interest in fine arts and illustration. Sylvester became a double Gold Medalist in the National NAACP Act-SO Competition in the categories of drawing and painting, exhibited her work in the United States Capitol through the Congressional Art Competition, and was mentored under the guidance of Newark Print Shop printmaker in residence Angela Pilgrim all before graduating Arts High School in Newark, NJ. Now having completed a chapter in her post-secondary education, Sylvester is using a well needed respite to enrich her artistic engagements and to dedicate time towards projects, such as her comic Atlas' Odyssey.

Besides giving time for personal projects, Orchid enjoys martial arts films, learning new things, and acquiring trinkets. Her favorite musicians are Massive Attack, Depeche Mode, and Gojira. She likes being indoors and outdoors, as she has a dream of having her own garden someday.