foxy production 狐福创作空间 new york...courtesy the artist, foxy production, new york, and...

FOXY PRODUCTION 狐福创作空间 NEW YORK

Dolfi Agostini, Sara. Good Life, Sara Cwynar. Valletta: Blitz, 2019.

SARA CWYNAR GOOD LIFE

A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing

Lauren Berlant

The good life is what we long for. Fantasies of the good life feed our habitats and identities, from personal desires to political projects and commercial culture. They inspire future visions and filter images of the past. Sara Cwynar's practice across photography, collage and film toggles between different epochs and aesthetics, revealing how the quest for the good life has been driven by evolving ideals, values, and taste, yet always grounded in conventionality and predictable comforts. Exploring the backbone of iconographies and cliches, where common constructs meet reassuring genres, Cwynar tackles the critical concept of visual truth and deciphers a reality of mundane objects and pictures merely reformulated by algorithms. Responding to the way technology challenges our vision, she creates a timeless and indelible reservoir of upfront, non-hierarchical images that resist the internet, the primary source of visual knowledge and experience in the XXI century.

The exhibition is a survey of the artist's practice since 2013. It kicks off with a selection of three video works - Soft Film (2016), Rose Gold (2017), and Cover Girl (2018) - scheduled to be projected on different days of the week in a gallery-turned-cinema. The videos substantially reverberate into one another, as well as in the photographic works hanging in the other galleries. On multiple visits, the viewer can recognize a seemingly innocuous gesture performed at different times by the artist and her model, or a recurring, plain object picked from our everyday and turned into a

Soft Film, 201616 mm film transferred to video, 7' 06", courtesy the artist, Foxy Production, New York, and Cooper Cole, Toronto


prominent symbol of that which we take for granted. In an age of fast consumption and materialist culture, Sara Cwynar's work offers the sense of deja vu we all experience outside of art museums, where uniqueness and rarity still provoke wonder.

Her early projects are all photographic, starting from the four prints of her first series Flat Death (2013-14), displayed as a filmstrip - or contact sheet. Here, she taps into the way photography - its technological evolution and digital circulation on the internet - has revolutionized our relationship to the physical world to the point of altering our sense of reality. The title of this series is appropriated from Roland Barthes' seminal book Camera Lucida (1980), in which the French philosopher examines the nature of photography as a witness of "what has been", that is inevitably linked to the past yet limited in truth, likeness and meaning for the present to which it now belongs. In a labor-intensive process of image-making, Sara Cwynar appropriates encyclopedic and commercial imageries of no artistic value, mostly from the 60s and 70s, and deftly assembles them into original compositions intertwining photography, sculpture and collage.

Toucan in Nature (Post it notes), 2013 Chromogenic print, 30 x 40 inchescourtesy the artist, Foxy Production, New York. and Cooper Cole, Toronto

The reality check lies in the details. In Toucan in Nature (Post it notes), the idealized image of an exotic bird, possibly sourced from National Geographic or equivalent, has been printed on several sheets of paper, joined with masking tape and covered in green post-it arrows. This latter action was intentionally clumsy, and the masking tape figures as the main hint of a three-dimensional experience in between the initial and final images. This scene of a fictional nature is followed by a commodified tourist experience of archeology and ruins. In Corinthian Column (Plastic Cups), the artist ironically reinterpreted a classic colonnade with plastic cups and other domestic odds and ends assembled on a tiled floor. The juxtaposition of the image and the objects draws the attention to a conceptual link between cultural appreciation and overly produced cheap commodities in capitalist societies.


Corinthian Column (Plastic Cups), 2014 Chromogenic print, 24 x 30 inches courtesy the artist, Foxy Production, New York, and Cooper Cole, Toronto

This association is further reinforced by the close proximity of The Display Stand No. 64 CONS H. 8 1/4" W. 24" D. 16 1/2", at first a business-to-business (B2B) image taken by an unskilled photographer- in which the shadows are all wrong- to publicize a gum display for convenience stores. If it is true that people eat with their eyes first, then Cwynar's final pictures are more than the eye can consume, especially this one


Display Stand No. 64 CONS H. 8 1/4'' W. 24'' D. 16 1/2'', 2014 Chromogenic print, 30 x 36 inches courtesy the artist, Foxy Production, New York, and Cooper Cole. Toronto

which combines up to thirty still-lives made of the original details. However, one work stands out in the Flat Death series, and it is Gold - NYT April 22, 1979 (alphabet stickers), an arrangement of gilded watches and letters laid on an equally gilded background, seemingly there to question the reverence we grant to gold. Given that the aesthetics and materials are the same, then why doesn't the value of this specific color scheme change with the passage of time and taste?

What does gold do that everything else does not? Its presence in the work and title of Tracy (Gold Circle) makes it immediately glamorous, despite the many other things in the portrait that are not. The model, Tracy, looks straight into the camera with a serious gaze. The pose is unnatural, her hair is undone, her feet covered with a green towel hinting at the marketing cult drawing women into fitness, from ycga to spinning. Today, a precarious life looks less so when paired with wellness and there is nothing that resonates more with world-class beauty than looking good or relaxed. This is especially evident on social media, where individuals adhering to simple lifestyle precepts can shine even more than collective bodies, and belonging counts much less than appearing. The popular quote attributed to American artist Andy Warhol¹, "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes" truly applies to our current times because social media supply a platform for anyone to become an instant celebrity and be the one "everybody is talking about".

1 The sentence was probably not Andy Warhol's, who himself admitted to never saying it in 1980. More information in the article of Rachel Nuwer, Andy Warhol Probably Never Said His Celebrated "Fifteen Minutes of Fame" Line, 8 April 2014, Smithsonian Magazine


Gold - NYT April 22, 1979 (alphabet stickers), 2013Chromogienic print, 30 x 40 inches, courtesy the artist, Foxy Production, New York, and Cooper Cole, Toronto

Tracy (Gold Circle}, 2017 Dye Sublimation Print on aluminum, 38 x 30 inches, courtesy the artist, Foxy Production, New York, and Cooper Cole, Toronto


However, Sara Cwynar is making it harder for the viewer to interpret Tracy's celebrity moment. Her printed body is covered with layers of glass and other confusing elements, like the golden circle that actually looks like a magnifying glass - or a ring- imposing upon most of her body. Besides the objects, there are various decontextualized snapshots and art reproductions, all showing women. The women in the images pertaining to art history, like Pablo Picasso's avant-garde masterpiece Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), are nude or sexualized. Does it matter that Tracy and the other real women in the candid portraits are not? They are not photoshopped either, but Tracy is the only one who lives in a present where photography retouching is available to all, both on digital cameras and smartphones. This is why in Sara Cwynar's work her unretouched body is an exception, or rather the epitome of the woman resisting the chauvinist cliches of muses and models.

In this exhibition, Armor (Sebastian Schmid, Harnash, 1550-60. Kat. Nr. 139) is Tracy's opposite. It is a 1950s photograph of sixteenth century armor, shot with a large format 8xl0 camera which instantly makes you think of fashion photography. It is a cold muscular object, resonating with a male-dominated history that is not far removed from current events. Sara Cwynar made her own version of it, in order to introduce a third layer - the present. The tryptic Avon Presidential Bust shows another such epiphany from the 1950s; this time it is not a photograph but three bottles of perfume inspired by the busts of American presidents. The heads are removed and replaced with a lid and some plastic wrap, adding to the sinister feeling emanated by these unusual cosmetic products. They are a mix of fantasy, vanity and futility, and yet they somehow still embody a sense of national identity and prosperity. For Sara Cwynar, they have also become involuntary symbols of the openly sexist U.S. presidential media show, the one American dream that has never belonged to women.

She fishes these and other artefacts out of her frequent journeys on eBay, where she explores the overlay of kitsch on what is discarded during the constant process of adding more material to our lives.

Avon Presidential Bust (Lincoln, Gold), (Washington, Gold) and (Lincoln, Gold), 20I 7 Metallic chromogenic prints, 3 prints, 24 x 30 inches each courtesy the artist, Foxy Production, New York, and Cooper Cole, Toronto


Armor (Sebastian Schmid, Harnash, 1550-60. Kat Nr. 139), 2017 Chromogenic print, 62 x 42 inchescourtesy the artist, Foxy Production, New York. and Cooper Cole, Toronto


Tracy (Grid 2), 2017Pigment print mounted on Dibond, 30 x x 38 inches courtesy the artist, Foxy Production, New York, and Cooper Cole, Toronto

Since capitalism in a globalized world harvest the cheap and disposable, our commodity imageries have lost a lot of the vision and originality that informed their conception, often becoming idealized versions of the past. This is why at the core of Cwynar's research are key factors like obsolescence and kitsch, which mainly contaminate what was once considered ahead of its time, even luxurious. Her explorations also emphasize how basic color gradients can be equally subject to the life and death cycle of objects and pictures in modern societies.

In Tracy (Grid 2), the same model lies on a color grid sourced from an old printing manual showing the technological potential for printing with the most fashionable nuances of the time. Like the limited spectrum of colors of early films for analog cameras, what the grid offered went soon out of the market as a consequence of the improvements in innovation of intangible goods. Looking back at Tracy, the pose once again evokes slight discomfort, and the empty hands are intentionally brandished for display. However, she is now decontextualized from her cultural baggage so evident in the other portrait, and that is because the focus is on the way the color grid resonates with her own bodily appearance, from the clothes she wears to her make up choices.

Sara Cwynar is demonstrating to the viewer how everything we are - and want to be - is subject to a standardized process when it comes to representation. This is also the result of cameras being unable to register real life colors, and printing processes offering inadequate solutions.


Red Rose, 2017; Magenta Rose, 2017; Pink Rose, 2017 Pigment prints, 24 x 30 inches courtesy the artist, Foxy Production, New York, and Cooper Cole, Toronto

Pictures, whether artistic or vernacular, are never more than a mere imitation of nature, and as shown in Cwynar's Rose series, our ways of looking at theme are also biased by how we employ colors in society and culture. For example, when William Eggleston pioneered color in photographs that were not intended for the advertising industry, critics condemned his work as extremely vulgar, because back in the 70s the privileged status of art was only granted to black and white photography. It took years to change the perception of the viewers despite the backing of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which organized his solo show in 1976². Fast forward to Sara Cwynar's Rose series; here she employs macro photography - used to shoot plants and insects -to pay homage to an icon of natural beauty, yet the colors look so saturated and synthetic that these real roses resemble home decor made of textured fabric. Moreover, the pink, magenta, and red colors mentioned in the titles of the three prints evoke standardized commercial nuances, further challenging the ability of the viewer to distinguish authenticity in a simulated world.

But does it matter? According to tidying expert³ and television superstar Marie Kondo, the only question we should ask ourselves is whether something in our life sparks joy. Cultural theorist Lauren Berlant analysed this very concept in her book Cruel Optimism (2011), where she argued that finding comfort in hoarding objects and other elements might be an attempt to overcome feelings of personal powerlessness. Feeling good has become a replacement of doing good, as political action is in the hands of the ultra-rich as usual, while physical risks becoming less accessible than virtual reality. Sara Cwynar's decision to step into film production also stems from a form of frustration. It follows the need to defy visual knowledge by incorporating sound and touch, two modes of learning that are of secondary importance in our new hyperconnected social media existence. In the photographic work vision is not the only language, yet everything else feels marginal. For example, text appears in the form of annotations to delineate the different stages and concepts imbedded in her artistic practice, while touch is mainly represented by hands, a recurring trope suggesting desire for what has not

2 Augusten Burroughs, William Eggleston, the Pioneer of Color Photography, Oct. 17, 2016, New York Times. 3 Marie Kondo stars in the Nelflix series Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, launched in January 2019 for the U.S. market.


Rose Gold, 2017 16 mm film transferred to video, 8' 01 • courtesy the artist, foxy Production, New York, and Cooper Cole, Toronto

been attained, along with a reminder of reality since they often come with scars and bitten nail polish.

In fact, it only takes a quick glance at a photograph for it to lie, and there is nothing text or touch can do to make up for it when they are just extra layers within the main visual experience. In the videos, instead, vision is constantly challenged, particularly when hands can touch and words acknowledge reality. In Rose Gold, for example, text is spoken in the form of aphorisms by a male narrator along with Cwynar herself, and it is an amalgam of personal observations and critical theory drawn from philosophers such as Jean Baudrillard, Rosi Braidotti, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The voices keep overlapping, ultimately demonstrating that the artist - her life, hopes and desires - draws no distinction from the rest of the world. Just like us, she is trapped in a commercialized space that is private no more, an lnstagram set with a myriad of inconsequential objects, transitory pictures, temptations from the past, and irresistible new gadgets soon to be forgotten like the rose gold iPhone.

Their cheesy patina echoes Milan Kundera's reflection on kitsch and image culture which has deeply informed Sara Cwynar's work. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the writer implies that kitsch is the true engine of humanity, because it allows the daily horrors of life to become acceptable. In other words, kitsch is wherever the power of distraction - and evasion - intercepts social emotions and collective unconsciousness. Sara Cwynar is not neutral to kitsch either. In Soft Film, her first video work, she is seemingly busy rearranging her attachments - from plastic cups to jewels, Nike shoes and South Korean photographs of reportage. However, her effort to produce a taxonomy of things based on colors and feelings is systematically counterpointed by the recurring words "soft misogyny". They show up right at the start, in the cryptic beginning of her monologue and keep returning, like a clue to the true political and social impact of things in our daily lives.


Cover Girl, 201816 mm film transferred to Video, 9' 17''courtesy the artist, Foxy Produc:tJon, New York, and Cooper Cole, Toronto

In Cover Girl (2018), her most recent film, the main narrator is a woman and Cwynar's voice make only a few appearances. On the screen, images of Tracy getting ready for her portraits intertwine with footage of a make-up company, while the viewer learns that the underlying principles for the cosmetics industry were actually set by men for women. The script doesn't offer any specific stances into identity politics, only shares other pieces of information about the pleasure and desire to be attractive, the use of green in Cezanne's paintings, and the psychological overtones of the color red. The aesthetic is clearly reminiscent of the documentary, and the approach is detached like in social science, but the artist is truly producing a climax. In fact, when the narrator mentions that cosmetics could be as old as 5000 BC, this apparently bare finding carries an unexpected negative connotation. Do we own our red lips?

The exhibition symbolically ends with A Rococo Base, a multi-layered photograph on a green backdrop reminiscent of Tracy (Gold Circle), which opens Cwynar's solo show at Blitz. The similarities between the works seem to outweigh the differences, whereas this work is not technically a portrait and draws from the popular parallelism between our era and the Gilded Age-a period of great prosperity and inequality in U.S. history, which lasted from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the Twentieth Century. The artist's attempt at offering a clear visual formulation of this reassuring historical concept remains at brainstorming level, as a collage of baroque sculptures, Picasso's paintings (again), perfume bottles, eyeshadows and much more lay on a flattened, highly saturated bi-dimensional surface. There are also scribbles, some barely legible, which suggest an anti-monument in spite of the large size of the print. Cwynar needed space to be able to reveal the full process of image-making resting behind the scenes of our beliefs. Though, as she bypassed the conventional rules of scale, composition and editing, she delivered an overly opulent, cosmetic stage that little resembles its original worldly source of inspiration.

- Sara Dolfi Agostini, curator


A Rococo Base, 2018Pigment print, 50 x 63 inches courtesy the artist, Foxy Production, New York, and Cooper Cole, Toronto


foxy production 狐福创作空间 new york...courtesy the artist, foxy production, new york, and...

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