Sara Cwynar

COOPER COLE is pleased to present Apple, a solo presentation of the work of Sara Cwynar. This is the artist’s fourth exhibition at the gallery.

A text by the artist follows.

I was thinking about how we are all making these giant archives that we will never have time to go back and bring to bear on our actual lives. Screenshots and jpegs and text messages.

I have a working list of things that come up in my searches. Sometimes I steer in their direction, but usually they just come up out of nowhere and reach for me.

That list is:

ambassadors, animals,  apple, balenciaga, Bayer, beauty, bellmer, berenice, blonde, body, breasts, car, cezanne, climate, clock, christina, computer, criminal, crying, death, earth, elephant, egg, eye, female, fashion, ferrari, fetus, fire, flower, Fruit, glass, heart, helicopter, hell, humiliation, laughing, lee miller, marilyn, marxism, me, money, mother, mouse, museum, muscles, myth, netflix, nude, office, painting, pantyhose, paradise, park chun hee, paula rego, peach, perspective, picasso,  prada, police,  pool, quid pro quo, Rome, snake, statue, swan, sun, textile, theatre, threat, tongue, touch, transparency,  vase, war, woman, women, wrestling, yolk, zendaya, zoo

Apple, features eight new photographs, four collages on Plexiglas and magnetic steel, and one video installation. The show includes several images centered around an alphabetical list of 68 words pulled from the media in the last two years (2021 and 2022). Some are more personal— – words that came up repeatedly through the algorithms generated by my online activity (Marilyn, flower, touch), while others are terms of more universal concern during this period (illness, climate, money). The list originated in my 2021 multichannel film Glass Life, which explores the way that truth gets constructed and solidified through images, and how art can play with those processes. It also considers the internet as an archive that can be controlled and organized to fit individual notions of what is true and real.

The central video in the exhibition—Video Index for Exhibition – “Apple” Toronto, 2022—serves as a working scrapbook or index to the show, and aggregates footage from my archives and current projects. It is centered around a digital swimmer as a talking head, a recurring character in my work, and brings together other footage from my studio and from the world. The exhibition title references the work Apple for Scale (after Steve Jobs), which references a portrait of Steve Jobs standing in front of a photo of an apple in 1976. Reminiscent of an educational image (A is for Apple) it serves in this exhibition as a starting point for the aforementioned alphabetical list, and as a marker of scale amongst the enlarged and shrunken down objects that populate the photographs (we usually have an idea of how big an apple is).

The embodiment of accumulation and repetition thread through the exhibition, most centrally through images depicting a human-scaled doll and models from the popular Montreal fashion site SSENSE.com. The doll is from a digital archive of 1950’s photographs of 18th century doll costumes, which mimic the pose and the shadow of e-commerce models found in another online location in 2022. The doll figure is meticulously created through a collage of objects purchased online, connecting French doll costuming to e-com stores, and pointing to how images repeat themselves over time. E-commerce models endlessly repeat the same three gestures with barely a slip in facial expression or movement. I wanted to bring these women to my studio, to think about how people are reproduced (and increasingly reproduce themselves) in the same image.

Sara Cwynar (b. 1985, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada) is interested in the way that images accumulate, endure, and change in value over time. Her conceptual photographs and films involve constant archiving and re-presentation of collected visual materials, layering diverse imagery with references to art theory. The works intricately recall advertisements, retail catalogues, and old art history textbooks. Her visual assemblages meditate on how vernacular images shape collective world views, and how those ideals can change through time and contextual manipulation.

Selected solo exhibitions include: Apple Red, Grass Green, Sky Blue, at ICA Los Angeles, (solo) (2022), “Source,” Remai Modern, Saskatoon,(2021);Sara Cwynar, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield (2019); Image Model Muse, Milwaukee Museum of Art, and Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, (2018-2019); Tracy, Oakville Galleries, Oakville, (2018);  Soft Film, MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2017). Select group exhibitions include Collection 1970s–Present: Search Engines, MoMA, New York (2020-2021); 33rd Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil (2018); Subjektiv, Malmö Konsthall, Sweden (2017); and Greater New York, MoMA PS1, Queens, NY (2015-2016).

In 2021, Cwynar presented a new work commissioned by Performa, New York, and in 2019 MoMA New York commissioned Cwynar to make a series of films that stream on the museum’s website and social media platforms. Cwynar lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, USA.