Through digital collages of fragmented spaces, Sylvia creates subtle narratives and
reflective observations on our shifting landscapes.
Sylvia Trotter Ewens is a Honduran-Canadian painter based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal,
Canada. She received her DEC in Fine Arts from Dawson College (2014) and
completed her Bachelors of Fine Arts with a major in Painting and Drawing (2018). After
a few years of further developing her practice and exhibiting, she returned to Concordia
for her Masters of Fine Arts degree in Painting (2024). Trotter Ewens has received multiple
awards, including The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant, the Claude F. Lefebvre
Scholarship, the Shirley Reed Graduate Scholarship, and the Lillian Vineberg Graduate
Award. Her work has been exhibited in both group and solo shows, including at the
Maison de la Culture NDG Botrel Gallery (2024), Warren G Flowers Art Gallery (2024),
Future Fair in New York (2024), Art Mûr (2023), and ARTCH (2020), among others.
Through collages of fragmented spaces, Trotter Ewens creates subtle narratives and
reflective observations on our shifting landscapes. These changes are particularly
explored in relation to climate concerns, environmental initiatives, and urban design.
Walking, observing, photography, and writing form the foundation of her creative
process, guiding the planning of each work. Drawing on her own writings for thematic
direction, she photographs urban architecture and natural spaces, capturing both
exterior and interior elements. These images are then decontextualized-torn, warped,
and reassembled into imagined environments that are then painted. The spaces she
constructs draw from architectural aesthetics, environmental issues, and personal
narratives, reflecting both the physical world and her evolving perceptions of it.
Trotter Ewens' paintings manifest gardens, structures, pollution, light, nature, and open
spaces, blending these elements with points of facture and residue, breaking the
resolution of the image. These interruptions evoke a sense of the ongoing
transformation taking place in the environments we inhabit. Through her process of
reimagining and redesigning these spaces, she explores psychological shifts that occur
within them, questioning how we relate to and reshape the world around us.