Sara Cwynar
432 Photographs of Nefertiti
Sara Cwynar’s composite photographs of found objects and images, like in this work 432 Photographs of Nefertiti, court feelings of time passing. Using studio sets, collage, and re-photography, she produces intricate tableaux that draw from magazine advertisements, postcards, or catalogs. Cwynar is interested in how design and popular images work on our psyches, in how their visual strategies infiltrate our consciousness. Her photographs are sculptural constructions that are photographed, printed, tiled, and re-photographed; images taken from darkroom manuals that are deconstructed using a scanner; and stock photographs that are collaged by hand and then re-photographed.
Cwyner is both related to a photo conceptual tradition of photography from Vancouver as well as to a new school of photography working with digital manipulation, scanners, stock photography and the notion of photography after image making, both of which are represented in the Kadist collection via artists such as Arabella Campbell, Ron Terada, Tim Lee, Rodney Graham, Ian Wallace from Vancouver and artists such as Chris Wiley, Lucas Blalock, Erin Shirreff or John Houck, who recently have explored the idea of photography beyond image making.