b. 1985
Sara Cwynar is a New York-based Canadian photographer and video artist whose multilayered images explore the idea of beauty in our image-driven consumer culture. Her work offers an inventive view into consumerism by revealing the artifice of photography and video. She investigates how beauty is constructed to uphold the power of society’s dominant group. Her photographs and films reveal the ways popular images infiltrate our consciousness. “I am also very interested in looking at the larger way that images work and circulate in our culture, the value that images have attained beyond their actual worth, and the simulated realities they perpetuate.”
Cwynar studied English Literature at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver and received her Bachelor of Design degree from York University, Toronto in 2010. She received her M.F.A. from Yale University in 2016 and worked as a graphic designed for The New York Times.
Cwynar’s work highlights the fact that familiar images can become unrecognizable. She rephotographs images from magazines, darkroom manuals, and stock photographs and turns them into collages or sculptural constructions. She uses these photographs and digital images to show that power dynamics are embedded in everyday images.
She makes essay-style films which incorporate performance and text, using overlapping narration and images. Her recent video art is a trilogy: “Red Film,” 2018; “Rose Gold, 2017; and “Soft Film.” “Red Film” focuses on the color red as an emblem of beauty. “Rose Gold” deals with the conflicting nature of desire between “the wanting, not the having.” “Soft Film” presents a jewelry box that unfolds discarded objects revealing relationships between people and their objects.
Her 2021 multi-channel installation, “Glass Life,” brings together multilayered portraits and stills from these three films. The film is presented on differently sized projection screens and journeys through advertising and politics. It is an immersive, multi-voiced meditation on the relationship between images and self and refers to the collapse of the boundaries between the public and private spheres.
“Apple Red/Grass Green/Sky Blue” was the first exhibition of her work in Los Angeles and was exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art. She has had exhibitions in Canada, New York, Connecticut, Brazil, Germany, and Sweden
Her work is in the permanent collection at the Guggenheim Museum, SFMOMA, Center Pompidou, Frankfurt’s Museum fur Moderne Kunst, among others.
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