| Sylvia Safdie | |
| Birth Place: | Aley, Lebanon |
| Nationality: | Lebanese, Canadian |
| Education: | Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree, Concordia University, 1975 |
| Known For: | multimedia artist |
| Partner: | John Heward (d. 2018) |
| Website: | https://www.sylviasafdie.com/ |
Sylvia Safdie (born 1942) is a Canadian artist who gathers and utilizes found natural materials in a variety of mediums such as painting, sculpture, drawing, installation, photography and video to explore different themes in her work, calling upon early childhood memories, her Jewish heritage, and her experience of moving from Israel to Canada. She works and lives in Montreal, Québec.[1]
Sylvia Safdie was born in Aley, Lebanon, on August 17, 1942, to her parents Leon and Rachel Safdie.[2] She was born into a Jewish family, the youngest of three siblings. Her eldest brother, Moshe Safdie (born 1938) is an architect, and her other brother, Gabriel Safdie (born 1940) is a poet and literature teacher.[3] She spent her early childhood years in Mount Carmel, Israel, but at age eleven, her family moved from Haifa, Israel to Montréal, Québec in 1953. She married, had two children, worked as a dental assistant and travelled. At the age of 26 while recovering from an operation she turned to painting. Safdie obtained her Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree at Concordia University, in Montreal, Québec, in 1975. Safdie currently resides and works in her sixteen-thousand-square-foot home in Montreal, Québec, which was shared with John Heward, who was an active artist and her life partner until his death in 2018.[4]
Safdie's early childhood memories, her Middle Eastern Jewish heritage, and experiences in Israel, followed by moving to a new country, are main sources of inspiration and inform her five-decade-long artistic career.[5] As a child, she would build sandcastles on the beaches near Haifa, where she became aware of their vulnerability amongst the waves with time, and further increased her fascination with transiency. At this time, she began to collect rocks and natural ephemera, which she then classified by size, shape, colour, material, and origin. These childhood practices and impulses were carried into her career as a professional artist and helped navigate her feelings of displacement after leaving Israel.
After completing her degree, Safdie has travelled broadly to places rich in her Israeli roots, such as Haifa, Jaffa, and Jerusalem, and to areas such as Morocco, Mexico, and India. During her travels, she physically collects or video documents specific natural objects, materials, or scenes, and ultimately capture the subtle archeological traces of place through time. Over the course of her explorations, Safdie collected over 500 earth samples, which she uses in her paintings and drawings. Her travels are viewed as an ongoing exploration of spirituality and her Jewish history, combined with her passion for nature, as a form of grounding herself with the land and past.
Chronologically, Safdie used found natural objects in her sculpture installations at the beginning of her career in the 1970s, and then, in the early 1980s, she began painting with oil and earth materials.[6] Scratching away and layering are among many physical techniques that characterize her process of painting. Later in her career, she was drawn to photography to capture inherent truths revolving around her themes. In 2001, Safdie began experimenting with video works that included or excluded sound, which demonstrated her ideas in a fluid, non-static way.
Sylvia Safdie's visual language speaks about the intersection of time, place, and memory, with deeper themes of transformation and temporality.[7] Her representation of the connection between the human figure, especially the female form, and the natural world is borderline abstract, yet consists of figurative representation. Safdie utilizes sand, earth, stone, wood, and other natural materials, either untouched or used as a medium.[8] Her process demonstrates her subject in a state of transformation that is emerging, disappearing, or “presently absent”. Her depiction of lost or displaced humans puts emphasis not on emptiness, but on how their presence lives on through traces in the natural world.
Safdie's sculptures are developed in multiple series and often titled simple Hebrew words such as Zakhor (memory), Keren (light ray), and Lahav (eternal flame). Many of her pieces take several years to culminate into a final work, collection, or series.
"I was interested in how we are formed by nature and how the body is part of it," she explains.[9]
Her solo shows include: Galerie de l'Esprit, Mtl. (1975); Musée d'Art Vivant Véhicule, Md. (1980); Galerie/Gallery Don Stewart, Montreal, Toronto (1981, 1982, and 1983); Evelyn Aimis Gallery (1984, 1986, 1988, 1990, 1992); Galerie J. Yahouda Meir, Mtl. (1987, 1994, 2015); Art Gallery of Hamilton (1987); Centre Saidye Bronfman, Md. (1987); Galerie Montcalm, Hull, Que. (1988); 460 Ste. Catherine St. W., Suite 728, Mtl. (1994); Justina M. Barnicke Gal., Tor. (1994); Diane Farris Gal., Van. (1996); Paul Petro Contemporary Art, Tor. (1998, 2000); Paul Kuhn Gallery, Calgary (2002–2003, 2007); Mackenzie Art Gallery, Regina (2011); and others.[10] In 2021, she had an exhibition titled As I Walk at the Darling Foundry in Montreal called "a masterly installation" by the Canadian art magazine Vie des Arts[11] and "haunting" by Art Forum.[12]
He work has been included in numerous group shows since 1978. Among them were the First Biennale for Québec Artists, Galerie du Centre des arts Saidye Bronfman, Montréal (1978); Face à face, Powerhouse Gallery, Montréal (1984); Hidden Values, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg, Ontario (1994); 25 Artists, 25 years: Celebrating the Faculty of Fine Arts, Galerie d'art Leonard & Bina Ellen, Université Concordia, Montréal (2001); Second Guanlan International Print Biennial 2009, Guanlan Museum, Shenzhen, China; and These Waters Have Stories To Tell, Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea, Wales (2018).
Her work is in the collection of the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and elsewhere in Canada, as well as in galleries in the United States, Brazil, Switzerland, and Denmark.