Sara Cwynar
Artisan: 9.4
Art
Trained as a graphic designer and photographer, Sara Cwynar channels her desire to create a tangible record of experience by compulsively collecting and ordering visual material. Her now-expansive image bank is comprised of photographs she takes herself, pictures culled from the internet, shorn from books, picked up at flea markets, and photocopied in libraries. This personal archive provides the source material for her projects, in which she bridges photography, graphic design, book-making, sculptural installation, collage and video to test the relationship of image and memory. Certain references recur throughout her work, as she uses, for example, theoretical explorations of kitsch and nostalgia (via Kundera, Barthes and Baudrillard) to visually negotiate deeper questions of paranoia, obsession, memory and alienation. The result is a body of work equally driven by concept and aesthetics, and teeming with haunting qualities, whether through surreal photography, hoarder-style accumulations or collaged compositions evoking stylish sci-fi fantasies. Cwynar’s installations thrive on this layering of materials, mediums, and stories: photographs (her own) are affixed en masse to the wall, thickly layered with found imagery, objects of sentimental value, and detritus, creating through the deluge, portraits of imagined collectors exhibiting behaviour not unlike her own compulsive gathering.
