Sara Cwynar Reviewed in Contemporary Art Review

August 23, 2022

Sara Cwynar and the Texture of Digital Pictures

By: Erin F. O’Leary

I read critic Lucy Sante’s stunning essay for Vanity Fair, “On Becoming Lucy Sante,” from bed one morning this January, my phone’s brightness turned down as my eyes acclimated to the light. In it, Sante, who came out as transgender in 2021 at age 67, recalls her discovery of FaceApp’s gender-swapping filter, through which she subsequently fed “every image of myself I possessed, beginning at about age 12.” She writes: “The effect was seismic. I could now see, laid out before me on my screen, the panorama of my life as a girl, from giggling preteen to last year’s matron.”

Though only a small part of the brave and elegant text, I’ve returned to this passage many times. It cracked something within me. By design, programs like FaceApp propagate an impossible and flat, hetero-patriarchal image of beauty, and imagining its use to quite opposite ends felt revelatory. It was also a profound reminder of the ways that our digital experiences are inextricably intertwined with, and not secondary to, our real lives. Sante’s experience insists upon photography’s capacity to do things, to affect our spirits and bodies in the physical world—a rich possibility given the insidious nature of the online spaces that our images increasingly live through and within.

Sara Cwynar’s 6-channel video installation Glass Life (2021), the centerpiece of her first Los Angeles exhibition, which closed at ICA LA in May, underscores the idea that the filtered, pixelated, repurposed, and reproduced photographs and images that we make—and that make our digital worlds—play a meaningful role in our lives even as they are fed through ill-intentioned, corporate containers. Installed in a blue-carpeted gallery with hard, macaroni-shaped benches, the earnest and immersive 19-minute work employs a chaotic chorus of scrolling images; video clips; swimming CGI avatars; and a dense, essay-like voiceover in its exploration of how beauty, power, selfhood, and capital are expressed in our contemporary image culture. While many photographic endeavors default to a characterization of digital space as artificial or flat, Glass Life imagines the images that comprise so much of our digital experience as textured, reframing the way that we think about their marked impact in our bodies and lives.

To make Glass Life, Cwynar brought digitally-sourced images and photographs into the physical world, printing and arranging them in her studio before animating them on camera. Pulled largely from books, social media, e-commerce, and news sites, the printed cutouts were laid out atop grid paper between layers of glass that create a sense of physical distance between them. In the installation, the stream of unmoored images loops, rewinds, and changes pace (from fast to faster) across the largest central screen, while two smaller ones situated on either side linger on and expand certain moments. Meanwhile, a male voice actor reads a searching, referential text that spans the duration of the film (he begins didactically, declaring, “From Walter B. to Kim K.…”; but what follows is far more open-ended). Many of the images are identifiable, or at least familiar, as they contain logos, celebrities, and copyrighted characters. But each slides offscreen far too quickly to be truly legible. Among the rapid sequence of images are shiny apples and the early, rainbow iteration of Apple’s logo; the pig face emoji; a chest X-ray; Disney’s Pinocchio character; personal video footage from a racial justice protest, the remnants of the Barneys New York “blowout” closing sale, and an exhibition at Rome’s Galleria Borghese; screen recordings from the hype-y fashion retailer SSENSE; kitschy vintage ads; and a confetti-trimmed portrait of the 30 or so world leaders present at the 2019 G20 summit, including Trump, Putin, and the Saudi crown prince. This collage-in-motion approach is an apt visualization of what it feels like to be online, where images of our intimate, daily lives press up against memes, photographs of war, and filtered selfies of influencers peddling discounts on whatever product.

[…]

To read the full review visit: Contemporary Art Review

For more information about Sara Cwynar please contact the gallery:

info@coopercolegallery.com

+1.416.531.8000

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