Sara Cwynar, Rococo Ferrari, 2024. Unique digital pigment print. Framed: 72 1/4 x 51 x 2 in. | 183.5 x 129.5 x 5 cm. Courtesy of the artist and The Approach, London. © Sara Cwynar
Sara Cwynar (b. 1985, Vancouver) examines the excess of pictures in today’s image-saturated culture through her colorful and layered photographs, films, and installations. Cwynar has accumulated a vast archive of visual material including self-made, commissioned, downloaded, and found photographs ranging from faded reproductions of popular modernist masterpieces to AI-generated images of familiar faces. She deploys these pictures incisively through a collage aesthetic that draws on the visual languages of design and advertising. By linking themes of seduction, desire, and commodification, Cwynar’s work surveys how the velocity of images circulating today conceals systems of control embedded in our everyday lives. For the ICA, Cwynar will create a newly imagined, two-part project for the museum’s Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall and the Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser Gallery, the first time an artist has worked simultaneously in these two spaces. The project will center on an immersive photo-based installation for an alphabetical list of terms—from Ambassadors to Zeus—suggested to her by a search engine algorithm based on her online research. Building on the artist’s longstanding investigation of the relationship between images and the construction of selfhood in the digital era, the works consider how life online increasingly structures our perceptions of the world.