Sara Cwynar
22 Mar - 16 May 2013
© Sara Cwynar
Everything In The Studio (Destroyed), 2012
Mixed media installation
courtesy of COOPER COLE, Toronto, Canada
Everything In The Studio (Destroyed), 2012
Mixed media installation
courtesy of COOPER COLE, Toronto, Canada
Foam 3h:
SARA CWYNAR
Everything in the Studio (Destroyed)
22 March - 16 May 2013
The work of Sara Cwynar in photography, installations and collage begins in obsessively collecting and ordering visual materials. Saving, taking and re-composing images in her art practice is a cathartic means of satisfying a constant impulse. She has to collect (even to hoard) and to create a tangible record of that experience, grabbing a small piece of the world and reconstituting it under her own terms. The resulting archive is composed of images saved from years of photo-taking, from encyclopedias, flea markets, and people she knows, as well as objects she encounters. In this process of accumulation and the resulting collection, she is interested in the ways in which we understand the world through pictures: how we view ourselves and our history through a shared image-based archive built from cultural fantasies and photographic tropes (examples include the commercial still life, the family portrait, the headshot and the landscape photograph). She is constructing her own personal archive as a way of intervening into the larger archive which she cannot control, and considering the life of photographs over time, especially at this time of change for the medium.
For the installation, Everything in the Studio (Destroyed), which will be presented at Foam 3h as part of the young talent programme of Foam, Sara Cwynar took all of the materials in her studio at one time, documented each item and arranged it into a digital plan where she could fit the entire contents into a corner of the gallery. She attempted to install the archive according to the plan, which quickly began to fall apart as images and objects were not how she had remembered them. She left the materials for a month, then destroyed the whole thing so that she would be forced to purge the archive - allowing herself to start anew, and documenting everything only with a camera. All that remains of this studio's worth of materials is the image.
The piece begins with a text by Andy Warhol where he explains that he "hates nostalgia" so rather than keeping any of his saved mementos and ephemera around, he puts everything in labeled boxes and stores it in New Jersey before eventually throwing it away. He doesn't want to live with his saved materials but he can't immediately discard them either. This project is Sara Cwynar's version of that idea: that the influence of an archive on an art practice is strong, but can also be overwhelming.
Sara Cwynar (1985, Vancouver) is a Canadian photographer, artist and graphic designer. She studied graphic design and photography at York University in Toronto and English at the University of British Columbia. Her work has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, Capricious Magazine, and Bad Day Magazine. She was listed as one of Print Magazine's 20 Under 30 New Visual Artists for 2011. Cwynar currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She is represented by Cooper Cole gallery in Toronto. Cwynar has published several publications for which she did the graphic design herself: Kitsch Encyclopedia, Lost & Found and Simulated Landscapes. Her show in Foam 3h is her first solo show in Europe.
SARA CWYNAR
Everything in the Studio (Destroyed)
22 March - 16 May 2013
The work of Sara Cwynar in photography, installations and collage begins in obsessively collecting and ordering visual materials. Saving, taking and re-composing images in her art practice is a cathartic means of satisfying a constant impulse. She has to collect (even to hoard) and to create a tangible record of that experience, grabbing a small piece of the world and reconstituting it under her own terms. The resulting archive is composed of images saved from years of photo-taking, from encyclopedias, flea markets, and people she knows, as well as objects she encounters. In this process of accumulation and the resulting collection, she is interested in the ways in which we understand the world through pictures: how we view ourselves and our history through a shared image-based archive built from cultural fantasies and photographic tropes (examples include the commercial still life, the family portrait, the headshot and the landscape photograph). She is constructing her own personal archive as a way of intervening into the larger archive which she cannot control, and considering the life of photographs over time, especially at this time of change for the medium.
For the installation, Everything in the Studio (Destroyed), which will be presented at Foam 3h as part of the young talent programme of Foam, Sara Cwynar took all of the materials in her studio at one time, documented each item and arranged it into a digital plan where she could fit the entire contents into a corner of the gallery. She attempted to install the archive according to the plan, which quickly began to fall apart as images and objects were not how she had remembered them. She left the materials for a month, then destroyed the whole thing so that she would be forced to purge the archive - allowing herself to start anew, and documenting everything only with a camera. All that remains of this studio's worth of materials is the image.
The piece begins with a text by Andy Warhol where he explains that he "hates nostalgia" so rather than keeping any of his saved mementos and ephemera around, he puts everything in labeled boxes and stores it in New Jersey before eventually throwing it away. He doesn't want to live with his saved materials but he can't immediately discard them either. This project is Sara Cwynar's version of that idea: that the influence of an archive on an art practice is strong, but can also be overwhelming.
Sara Cwynar (1985, Vancouver) is a Canadian photographer, artist and graphic designer. She studied graphic design and photography at York University in Toronto and English at the University of British Columbia. Her work has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, Capricious Magazine, and Bad Day Magazine. She was listed as one of Print Magazine's 20 Under 30 New Visual Artists for 2011. Cwynar currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She is represented by Cooper Cole gallery in Toronto. Cwynar has published several publications for which she did the graphic design herself: Kitsch Encyclopedia, Lost & Found and Simulated Landscapes. Her show in Foam 3h is her first solo show in Europe.