"Image Model Muse" Explores How Media Shapes Us

Museum September 11, 2018 Megan D Robinson

Courtesy the artist, Cooper Cole, Toronto, Foxy Production, New York

Sara Cwynar, Tracy (Grid 1), 2017, pigment print mounted on Dibond

Opening Friday at the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia), Sara Cwynar: Image Model Muse uses film, collage, and composite photographs to examine how design and popular images impact our psyches, affect our social and political realities, and mold our conceptions of beauty. Cwynar’s first US solo museum exhibition, Image Model Muse includes 11 photographs from the artist’s ongoing Tracy series, as well as three of her latest films—Soft Film (2016), Rose Gold (2017), and Cover Girl (2018).

Courtesy the artist, Cooper Cole, Toronto, Foxy Production, New York

Sara Cwynar, Tracy (Gold Circle), 2017, dye sublimation print on aluminum, edition of 3 with 2 AP

Her work questions the permanence of objects when popular culture renders the lifespan of images increasingly short. The obsessive materiality of her photographic images call attention to their constructedness, serving not only as a compelling formal device, but as a metaphor for how beauty and desire are also constructs in and of themselves."
Gabriel Ritter, Curator and Head of Contemporary Art, Mia

Cwynar re-appropriates dated kitschy advertising, creating intricate tableaux, using vivid colored backdrops, found objects and images, to comment on our social and political environment and our evolving history. Her multilayered films deal with materialism, the mechanism of desire, changing perceptions of color, gender, and branding, consumerism, sexism, perception, truth and beauty.

Courtesy the artist, Cooper Cole, Toronto, Foxy Production, New York

Sara Cwynar, Cover Girl (still), 2018, 16 mm film on video with sound

Courtesy the artist, Cooper Cole, Toronto, Foxy Production, New York

Sara Cwynar, Soft Film (still), 2016, 16 mm film on video with sound

Courtesy the artist, Cooper Cole, Toronto, Foxy Production, New York

Sara Cwynar, Rose Gold (still), 2017, 16 mm film on video with sound

Based in Brooklyn, Cwynar (Vancouver, BC, Canada, 1985) has an MFA from Yale University; a Bachelor of Design from York University, Toronto, ON; and studied English Literature at the University of British Columbia. Cwynar has had solo exhibitions in New York, London, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Italy, and Sweden and has work in the permanent collections of a number of museums.