Jacquelyn Strycker works primarily in printmaking, collage, and fibers-based media. Drawing on quilt making, geometric abstraction, and the 1970s Pattern and Decoration movement, she creates unabashedly maximalist, fluorescent works that revel in the pleasures of color, pattern, and craft. She makes Risograph prints on hand-made paper, which then she cuts up, reconfigures, collages, and sews into large, densely patterned quilt-like wall pieces.
The Risograph printing process functions as both tool and subject: technology repurposed to examine tensions between handicraft and industrial production. Her collages and soft sculptures take the form of quilts and textiles while refusing their utility.
Strycker says “print processes like this as a means of blurring the distinction between handmade, digital, and mechanical space, and playing with a sense of material transformation. I hand-draw quilt squares and stitches, print them in hyper-saturated colors on handmade papers and fabric, and then collage and sew them. A textile becomes a drawing, becomes a print, becomes a textile again in an ongoing cycle of media transference. This tension between the handcrafted and the machine-made is central to my work. I revel in the moments of “glitch” where the perfect replication of the digital world breaks down, introducing happy accidents and irregularities. Ultimately, I seek to create works that offer playful yet rigorous exploration of materiality and process while challenging traditional hierarchies of art-making.
Strycker has an MFA from Tyler School of Artand is a faculty member at Pratt Institute and at the School of Visual Arts. Her work has been exhibited at Print Center New York; The Weatherspoon Museum, Greensboro, NC; Kunstraum Gallery, Brooklyn; Annmarie Sculpture Garden & Arts Center, Solomons, MD; Peep Space, Tarrytown, NY; Collar Works, Troy, NY; and Piano Craft Gallery, Boston; She has participated in residencies at Institute for Electronic Arts, Alfred, ArtPod Berlin, Gaia Studio, The Women’s Studio Workshop and the Vermont Studio Center, and is a member of the inaugural cohort of the Print Center New York’s New Voices program. She is a 2023 Queens Art Fund grant recipient. Her work is in the collection of Alfred University and the New York Public Library.
Jacquelyn Strycker lives and works in New York City and is represented by Kathryn Markel Fine Arts which has two gallery locations in New York City.