Kasmira Snyder reclaims the night in ‘Untethered’ 

Over the summer, Kasmira Sydner took part in an artist residency at the Chautauqua Institute, located on a lake within a 750-acre gated community in western New York.

The secure, remote nature of the setting introduced for the artist what she described as “an economically privileged bubble” that allowed her to exist in space in ways that she hadn’t been able to elsewhere. More specifically, this meant that she could abscond to the woods to paint at night, often wearing headphones and listening to music.

“And it was interesting to see for myself how safety is something that can be bought,” Snyder said in early March at Wild Goose Creative, where her new exhibition, “Untethered,” kicks off with an opening reception from 6-9 p.m. tonight (Friday, March 13). “I don’t think we often think about how spaces can be excluded to women, or to queer folks, or to people of color. And about those invisible barriers that exist that make me feel like I can’t do this work … because of concerns about my own safety. … For me, as a woman, the night is something that has always fascinated me, both as a spectator and a participant. And I would love to go out and take up space at night. But I find myself resistant to going out downtown by myself at night, or to wander through a park late at night. And I’m interested in exploring that tension in my work.”

Nearly all of the paintings on display in “Untethered” feature female-esque figures – Snyder alternately referred to them as “nymphs” – each hungrily taking up space within their darkened environs. Many strike animal-like poses, mirroring alligators (see: the woman submerged in a darkened lake, only her eyes and the top half of her head visible above the surface of the water) and even the artist’s pet cat. In one painting (pictured above), the figure appears almost feral, as though she might strike were the viewer to make any sudden, unexpected movements.

“And that’s a little of what I was going for, where it’s a little uncanny, and where you’re looking at them and seeing them, but it’s maybe a little uncomfortable,” said Snyder, who then drew a contrast between the women depicted in her work and those in classic paintings by the likes of Titian (“Venus of Urbino”) and Monet (“Olympia”), whose figures are “sort of just draped to be looked at.”

“And I think part of it is just the scale, right? Having them take up more space,” the artist continued. “And then it can happen in the body language, having more disconcerting or confrontational poses, or confrontational eye contact. Having these figures challenge that almost prop-like femininity we’ve seen is important to me – especially in this time where we’re seeing a resurgence of tradwife-ism and these 1950s-esque ideas of what young women should be aspiring to. I think having something that challenges the way you look at the female form is exciting and important.”

There are other dynamic shifts at play within “Untethered,” with Snyder working from imagination rather than models or source photographs – a pivot that introduced a sense of freedom, loosening her brush strokes and even allowing her to incorporate colors that sit at some remove from reality. 

“Using a model definitely constrains me more, where it’s easy to slip back into using local color,” she said. “And you can even stray from realistic anatomical depictions, which has been fun for me, because I was so immersed in realistic portraiture before. This has been a nice way to cut loose.”

Snyder went on to compare the emerging abstraction in her work with the surrealist women painters of the 1930s and ’40s, who she said were creating absurdist depictions of femininity as one means to “push back against a resurgence of conservative expectations” placed on women. Then as now, she continued, the circumstances included the introduction of a global pandemic, a rise in political conservatism, deep economic unrest, and the threat of world war. “So, I can see people introducing absurdism back into the work in response to what we’re seeing around us,” said Snyder, who cited the paintings being done by contemporaries such as Sasha Gordon and Elizabeth Glaessner.

While Snyder will typically begin a painting with at least some idea of the larger concept she intends to explore, there are also aspects to the work that take time and space to reveal themselves.

“Sometimes I think the paintings know me better than I know myself, because I’ll step back from the work I was making in a certain period in my life and it will be like, oh, the writing was literally on the wall,” said Snyder, who has begun to discern certain through lines existent in this more recent collection related to everything from her divorce last year and the current political and social environment to the rise in AI technology and how it allows for the likenesses of women to be “adapted and manipulated.” “I think sometimes the work speaks to things before I know I’m speaking to them. And even when I’m working with a level of intentionality, the subconscious has a way of dribbling in.”