Sara Cwynar

Early Life and Education

Cwynar grew up in Vancouver, Canada, where her twin sister Kari Cwynar is currently a curator. She was introduced to the idea of “kitsch,” which features prominently in her work, by the figure-skating costumes that she and her sister would wear in competition. She studied English Literature at the University of British Columbia and eventually earned a Bachelor of Design Honours degree from York University in Toronto in 2010. Cwynar works as a freelance graphic designer for the New York Times. She earned an MFA in Photography from Yale University in 2016.

Work

Cwynar uses a variety of media, including photography, collage, book-making and installation, to explore the nature of photographic images and the power and limitations of the medium itself. Cwynar’s background in literature and graphic design helps to create the fascinating hybridity of her pieces. Through the use of saved personal photographs and found images from both printed resources and the internet, Cwynar’s work communicates not only about the final image of a photograph but also about the process of image making.

Cwynar has been exhibiting work since 2009, when she was featured in her first group show at Gallery 1313 in Toronto called "Wayfaring: Towards Answering a Call". She designed the cover art for a 2013 album by the band Washed Out using a combination of photography, illustration and Photoshop.

Cwynar had an exhibition in 2014 at Flat Death at Foxy Productions in New York. The exhibition had its ideological roots in Kitsch Encyclopedia and explored “a kind of ‘ritual extermination’ upon the hyperreal by confusing representation and reality.” Like Cwynar’s work in general, this show was a mix of photography, collage, rephotography, appropriation and studio set-ups.

Cwynar's 2015 project Presidential Index featured photographs of Avon Presidential Bust Cologne bottles that she bought on Ebay and removed the heads of the presidents so that only their torsos are visible. In some pieces, she enlarged the busts to be as large as her own torso and in others she arranged the bottles according to the popularity of that president’s scent. She paired these images with pictures of a make-up palette from “Ultra Cosmetics” and two photographs of rugs. Cwynar’s ideas behind this piece link these objects to the desire for aesthetic change through commercial and material goods.

Her work is in the permanent collection at The Dallas Museum of Art; FOAM Photography Museum, Amsterdam; MoMA Library, New York; Soho House, Toronto; TD Bank Canada Collection, Toronto; and MoMA PS1, New York.

Influences

Cwynar’s work and influences combine an appreciation for and interest in high and low culture. She credits the works of fiction and the theoretical texts of Jean Baudrillard, Roland Barthes, Milan Kundera, Don Delillo and Walter Benjamin as major influences on her artistic production. Cwynar also cites inspiration from photographic tropes and how they change over time. Commercial food photography is a strong influence, particularly how the reception and appetite for food that looks a certain way has changed dramatically in the past decades.

Publications

She has published two books,

Kitsch Encyclopedia builds on an interest in the ordinary object that Cwynar attributes to her reading of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The title reflects Cwynar’s understanding of Kundera’s definition of “kitsch” as images that we are drawn to in order to escape from all that is aesthetically unpleasant in life.

Solo Exhibitions

Awards