Fort Point Inspirations: Sylvie Agudelo

Challenging traditional ideas about portraiture, Fort Point artist Sylvie Agudelo has been engaged in a long-term project to more accurately capture the essence of a person. Embedded in the intersection of science and art, the fifteen-year resident of the neighborhood explains, “I’m inspired by hybrid science-art people.” She lists Michelangelo, Lars von Trier, MatthewBarney, Vincent van Gogh, and Edgar Degas as a handful of artists whose intense focus on art and representation continues to impact her work.

She says, “A portrait is traditionally a 2-D image with people formally dressed, of a particular moment in time—you don’t really get a sense of what that person is really like, what makes them special.” Hoping for a more intimate and revealing picture, she has recently been making mixed media portraits, or “a natural history collection.”

Photo courtesy Sylvie Agudelo

Looking at her earlier work shows that her questions about portraiture are not new ones. From photographs of the inside of people’s refrigerators—or as she says, “another kind of portrait”—to large-scale photographs of people and landscape merging, her work continues to work toward a better language for representing personality.

In 2011, Agudelo was part of a team with James McLeod who created “Embroidered,” a public installation in Fort Point. The pair brought together text and images from contributors in the neighborhood and these elements were used in composing the art for installation. Silk-screened glass panels interacted with large embroidered cut-out silhouettes and became “A collective portrait of the neighborhood by the neighborhood.”

Installation of Embroidered, 2011

Another example of her inventive take on portraiture is the working piece that was included in a City Hall new media show in 2011. “Using 3rd party / government / institutional portraiture, the picture questions how the government sees us,” Agudelo says. “Is it a more accurate portrait because the machines have no relationship with you—because you aren't posing for posterity?”

This idea of data collection and exploration has emerged countless times in Agudelo’s career. She says, “I’m trying to figure out the algorithm of what makes us who we are,” which is precisely where science and art, and the artist’s reverence for these oftentimes competing elements, unites in her work. Describing this recent series as “Investigations into what is an accurate portrait,” the overriding question, “what do you really know about a person?” attempts to be answered by collecting and presenting elements of their personality. Rather than the stale trappings of portraiture, Agudelo’s work seeks alternate measures.

Image of Third Party Identity Project, Sylvie Agudelo

“When someone close to you dies,” she says, “you may choose to save a t-shirt, letters— things sentimental and intimate.” Likewise, her new pictures “involve the biology of the person. I’m trying to combine that with those other unguarded moments.”

The connections to artists like Van Gogh and Degas are clear, as they sought to present a different sort of truth in portraiture as well. In Degas’ case, these revealing and harsh, often unguarded and disquieting images represented a wholly unique method of capturing the essence of the emerging middle class. Often enabled by his study and use of photography, he no longer presented an idealized version of people—as his pictures sought a truer depiction of life than portraiture had allowed prior to his moment. And with Van Gogh, his drawings and paintings depict an emotion so separate from the traditional mask of portraiture, he often rendered the subject’s face completely obscured.

Edgar Degas, Bellelli Family Portrait, courtesy Wikipedia

Continuing in the tradition started by the Impressionists, Sylvie uses alternate means for creating a representative identity in her portraits. In this regard, the scientific approach can be seen throughout her work. “Observe, collect data, make hypotheses,” is here, and the former field biologist who once lived and worked in Woods Hole says “I really want to know what makes anything tick—I can’t help it.”

Sorrow, and Old Man in Sorrow, both by Vincent van Gogh.

Part of her current project includes capturing portrait subjects in their natural environment using video and still photography. Below is one of these stills from a video of Agudelo and fellow artist PaulLaffoley during a typical Sunday lunch. The project uses natural light and a true environment for a greater sense of person and place. She says, “I see portraiture as an extension of observing animals—some form of being a naturalist—from scientific collection.”

 Video Still, courtesy Sylvie Agudelo

In addition, Agudelo’s focus on art and science in her work extends from approach into process and methodology. “I like to make my own instruments, my own filters,” she says. “My grandmother encouraged this—I am very comfortable around machines—but maybe don’t understand people as well.” Yet Agudelo’s portraiture reveals an uncanny understanding of the personal and intimate, as revealed with new methods for rendering.

While she says, “In math, in machines, in systems you string together, you can count on X + Y = Z. But with people… you get…”

And clearly these explorations only serve to provide another set of questions for the artist to answer with art. But despite their foundations in science, these works are steeped in emotion.  “Maybe it’s a big part of living in the city—but I feel we are farther and farther away from one another,” she says. Even so, Agudelo’s pictures bring us closer.

About the Author: Kurt Cole Eidsvig is an artist and poet who lives and works in Fort Point. To learn more about Eidsvig visit http://www.kurtcoleeidsvig.com/