Jackson Junge Gallery is excited to announce Threads of memory, a solo exhibition featuring paintings by viral fine artist Sydney Swisher who specializes in oil on fabric paintings. In an era defined by technological acceleration, Swisher’s work explores the intersection of memory, materiality, and machine intelligence. By prompting generated images through the uploading of personal photos and descriptions of memories, she creates familiar yet digitally fabricated scenes that are then painted with oil onto thrifted fabric. The pieces serve as a collage of old & new, with the reference locations being a blend of real and falsified spaces. Her work brings digital recollection into physical form and navigates contemporary paradoxes.

While Sydney Swisher has amassed an incredible fan base online, with over 5 million likes on her videos and almost 600k followers across social media platforms, Threads of memory is only the second physical solo exhibition of Swisher’s work. The reception she’s gotten online is more than she ever imagined. A self-taught painter from a small, rural town in southern Illinois, Swisher has found success as a corporate graphic designer. As a result of her career, Swisher is focused on how machine intelligence is coming into our digital space and warping the human narrative, which inspired her to explore generative AI as a tool in the creative process. AI is not the core of her work, but a part of it, used specifically to explore themes of memory, nostalgia, and the blurred line between real and imagined. Her goal is to create "amalgamated" places that don’t exist, but which speak to collective memory.

Swisher starts with a nostalgic memory or the feeling of a vaguely familiar place. She then gathers personal and found images from thrift stores, her own photography, or her family film photo collection. She feeds her references into AI (Midjourney) to generate blended visuals that feel like memories more than literal depictions. Swisher’s painting If it comes to you, it means something gives a peek at a dated living room drenched in mauve, the view seemingly dissolving into a vintage floral-patterned piece of fabric. One of the most personally nostalgic scenes Swishers created, she remembers the painting “was inspired by the home I was raised in until the age of 4. Although this is not the exact living room, and I don't have a good image of the room, this is how I remember it through my childhood memories. I feel that the younger the memory, the more vividly I see the scene.” After generating an AI image from photos and memories, Swisher further refines it in Photoshop to create her reference. She includes these elements into her physical paintings, creating a hybrid of digital and traditional media. Swisher elegantly makes the transition from an intricate digital process to an intense art form requiring a high degree of technical skill, oil painting. Her painting “Nonviolent Misbehavior” highlights her skill with the medium, capturing subtle shifts in shadow as light bounces around a chandelier painted in oil.

Swisher also incorporates thrifted materials into her paintings to further bridge the digital and real. Adding physical objects like blankets, curtains, and crafts that once belonged to someone adds a further connection to a personal past, while creating a new collective narrative around the items. Swisher’s painting “When You and It Are Aligned” depicts a kitchen workspace warmly lit by a flood of sunshine streaming through a window. Swisher delicately sewed a cloth to sit on the table and lace into the window dressings of the painting to pay homage to the details of our cherished daily possessions. Reflecting on the evolution of this collection, Swisher said “I continued to try to make these pieces more sculptural, with sewn-in pieces ‘spilling out’ of the canvas. I would like to continue to challenge myself in this way to create memories that seem to be ‘reaching out’ into our current reality. Making this transition seamless is pretty difficult, but I appreciate the challenge and hope to continue to push the work in this direction.” Swisher’s The good of it features an actual lampshade jutting out from the canvas where a familiar still life is painted of an armchair, side table and lamp.

Swisher’s work is a commentary on authorship and influence. While prompted by her own memories and images, she does appropriate fragments from strangers, blending them into new narratives. There is a parallel between AI and the natural artistic process - both involve borrowing, remixing, and reinterpreting pieces of existing work. Swisher believes “creativity has always been about taking fragments of your influences and fragments of the past and creating something that's a new story that's authentic and unique to you.” While AI can enhance creativity, Swisher thinks artists, unlike machines, add emotional depth and personal narratives to their work. Her goal is to create work that feels authentic, even if built from fragmented, artificial sources.

For Sydney, “this collection is an amalgamation of years of my interests through my life. It incorporated my love of crafting, photography, technology, painting, and mixed media.” While all the pieces Swisher created for Threads of memory start at an attempt to re-create her own personal memory, she sees them as a tapestry woven together with threads of memory from many individuals. Scenes that are specific to no one, but evoke collective nostalgia and probe the evolving nature of human experience in the digital age. They allow us to step into a familiar time, to experience a sense of warmth and comfort that is often associated with home, to have a deeper appreciation for the complexity of our unique history, and to question our future direction in a world filled with fabricated images of the past.