Jill Sylvia

BROWSE ARTISTS

B. 1979
American

jillsylvia.com

Jill Sylvia is strictly known for her work with financial ledgers used in accounting to manually track incoming and outgoing payments, essentially all profit and loss. She has deconstructed the individual ledger sheets into cascading waterfalls or assembled them into three-dimensional sculptures resembling American buildings of institutional power, like the U.S. Capital. For her piece in Cultural Currency, Sylvia painstakingly cut away at a ledger book that once belonged to her grandfather, leaving behind its skeletal remnants to reflect several conceptual ideas. Most notably, the drape and accumulation of the ledger’s lattice-like grid visually represent thoughts about gains and losses in one’s life. The notion of “value” is also called into question – the value of our daily pursuits, labor, and economic advancement – as if for some to succeed, others must fail. Perhaps this piece also hints at what is unknown or hidden in the financial world. The passage of time is also thematically explored – a ledger provides a record of all transactions over time, numerous hours were required to create the artwork, and technology has forced ledger books into obsoletion. All at once, time has expanded and collapsed.

Jill Sylvia received her BA from Bard College in Studio Arts and an MFA in sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute. She has exhibited at the Berkeley Art Museum, the Currier Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and numerous other art galleries and museums. Sylvia’s work is also in several collections, including the de Young Museum, the Anderson Collection, and the Fidelity Corporate Collection, among others. She currently lives and works in San Francisco, CA.