Sometimes you stumble across work and just have to have a nice recline, exhale slowly and think to yourself, “thank you, lovely stranger, for sharing how you see the world through your crazy-talented-and-original eyeballs”. This happened most recently with Sydney Sie, a Taipei based photographer and graphic designer who’s flipping reality around with her her hyper-saturated, colourful aesthetic.
Sydney’s work is instantly arresting with colour use, then intriguing with subject matter. She explains, “I want my works to be bright but eerie, and include aspects of graphic that particularly interest me, such as colour. I like to capture surreal moments, but those moments or atmospheres I created through different analogue and, or digital approaches.” The work is rife with gradient colour, optical illusion and an ever-present exploration of femininity and the body. Limbs are disconnected, inhabited by other creatures or creating their own landscapes within the environments beyond Sydney’s lens. In her series, The Nothingness of Amelie, we see bodies in space, disassociated from being human, autonomous and their own entities. Not quite objectified, just maybe in another diorama-like world where a spine or nervous system isn’t necessary to live amongst gradients, baby pot-plants and be confined only by abstract line formations.
Her extraordinary use of colour is unreal, surreal and stirs slight feelings of hyperactivity within us. The photographs are essentially still life, but there is nothing still or stale about these environments. Positively bursting with energy and aura, each image is like Sydney’s offered us a little telescope to peer into a world we wouldn’t mind living in for a day. Full of contradictions, we can’t decide whether immersing ourselves in it would be psychedelic or mellow, loud or soft, feel harsh or like a fine, shimmering powder. Either way, we’re fully packed and ready to go there. Where can we buy tickets?
See more work from Sydney Sie on her website and Instagram.
