SARA CWYNAR. FLAT DEATH

Sara Cwynar assembles images from objects and found photographs that court feelings of time passing. Using collage and re-photography, she produces composite images that call to mind old magazine advertisements, postcards, or catalogs.

Cwynar is interested in dated commercial images; in the failure, with time, of their visual trickery; in the waning of their seductive powers. Her works highlight how the once familiar becomes foreign; how the fetishized object can lose its luster; how glamour can fade.

Flat Death combines sculptural constructions that are photographed, printed, tiled, and re-photographed, together with images from darkroom manuals that are decomposed using a scanner. Cwynar’s process is circular; she starts and finishes with a photograph, after a journey of intervention and manipulation that ultimately disrupts the smooth surface and the perspective of the stock image.

Like a reel of film frames, a row of prints line two walls, while two large floral still life works hang on adjacent walls. Together, the works impart an uncanny sense of a lost world of images that Cwynar has collected and recalibrated to present as evidence that images never die, they just float somewhere between the traditional realm of the analog and the Internet, or between complex emotional attachments and kitsch.