Sara Cwynar on the feminist art of smashing capitalist image culture

Living as we do in the age of Instagram grids, Facebook streams, Pinterest boards, online dating apps and Google Image libraries, it’s common knowledge that the swapping, sharing and searching of images dictates how we operate in the world — from life decision-making based on Instagram envy to selecting romantic partners and finding healthy dinner options. But while we spend large swathes of time idly scrolling, swiping and flicking through, the individual impact and power of images is rarely given the consideration it deserves. It’s here that the Canadian-born, Brooklyn-based artist Sara Cwynar, whose exhibition Image Model Muse recently opened at Milwaukee Art Museum, steps in. Working across video, collage, photography and installation, Cwynar intervenes in the pixelated fuzz to make sense of the torrent, the incessant image flow, the barrage of images inescapable for anyone existing in the twenty-first century.

“I’m trying to think about our shared public archive of images and objects, and how they affect us and work their way into our brains,” Cwynar tells SLEEK of her conceptual approach to art-making. Cwynar, who trained initially as a graphic designer and worked for three years at The New York Times Magazine, is fascinated by the arbitrary values we ascribe to images — something that she learned while working at the Times, a publication read by millions of people. “So much of what we consume is only made by a few people, and then handed down to everyone else so that it seems kind of inevitable or natural,” explains Cwynar about working at such an influential media platform. As an artist, she now seems more interested in questioning that inevitability, that sense of power in the hands of the few, and weave her way into the fabric of image construction to dissect the role that images play in our understanding of ourselves and the world. 

“The effect of images changes how we see ourselves in our heads, even in ways that we might not actually be able to recognise on a daily basis — all the images that come at you through the internet and through books are really important in shaping what we think the world is. But often they are coming from really skewed sources,” Cwynar shares with notable passion for her subject. “I’m trying to break some of that down, but I’m also trying to come from an individual or personal approach within all of that. And I’m trying to also think about: what does it feel like to be a person living with all these things and choices and images?”

Cwynar’s drive to dismantle the hegemonic nature of images — often through the visual strategies associated with advertising and design — has significant consequences for feminist art-making. The artist, who says she’s “always been a feminist,” is particularly interested in the ways we designate value to things from a feminist perspective and in turn, the objectification of women under stultifying capitalism. Among the works on display at the Milwaukee exhibition, is the video Cover Girl (2018), which examines how standards of beauty are imposed on women. “It’s also about standardisation in general,” says Cwynar. “How intangible things like colour or skin tone or ideas about what’s beautiful get standardised and reproduced by capitalism and by people in power.” Meanwhile, another video, Soft Film (2016) employs plush, velvet jewellery boxes “as vessels to talk about ‘soft misogyny’,” which dominated the news at the time she was making it.

At the heart of Model Image Muse is a series of photographs of Cwynar’s friend — and longtime muse — the graphic designer and art director, Tracy Ma, who also works at The New York Times. The composite photographs are a beguiling combination of studio portrait and collage, with Ma knowingly lolling amongst a mish-mash of layered imagery and objects (many of which are outmoded consumerist items and technology), set against a bright curtain of magenta, cerise, or emerald. Due to her profession in the media, Ma was the perfect subject for Cwynar — “I wanted to photograph her because I knew she would understand what we’ve always been talking about: the history of the representation of women. And I definitely didn’t want it to feel like it was about design and objects, I wanted it to feel like there’s a real person there.” What might be enchanting, intricate and luminous images offer, in fact, a wise skewering of society’s tendency to reduce women to consumable image. In response, Cwynar selects a subject actively involved in the image-making machine, but who is also a woman of colour historically omitted from the visual canon.

“Tracy poses with great irony as if she’s really aware how bodies like hers have been depicted historically and how modernist studio portraits would have always been of white women,” explains Cwynar. “She’s just in so many ways the perfect model because we would have had all these conversations about feminism and about women working in the magazine industry together. She understands everything that I’m thinking about in terms of representation.”

As is so often the case in a world spun by the gloss and glare of images, the best critiques come through the art of juxtaposition, montage and collage (one need only look at the popularity of memes in the age of Trump to recognise the political validity of this form of image-making). In Cwynar’s composites, Ma is combined with paintings and photographs of women, which position her within a constellation of women, but where she is in control of her own image. As Cwynar notes, “It creates a bigger picture of this type of representation that makes you think more about how you’re used to seeing women be depicted”. And ultimately, as the pictures of Ma suggest, advise you to subvert and take back control of it. 

See more images from the exhibition below:

Sara Cwynar: Image Model Muse runs through 4 August at Milwaukee Art Museum. 

All images courtesy of Sara Cwynar, Cooper Cole, Toronto, Foxy Production, New York. © Sara Cwynar