Barneys New York

A dynamic configuration of images and videos overlaid with musings on human existence.

Brightly hued and sonically dense, Sara Cwynar's Rose Gold is a richly layered reflection on the relationship between colour, technology, material objects, and desire elicited from the talismanic powers of the Apple Rose Gold iPhone.

Projected on video, Soft Film combines elements of Sara Cwynar's composite photography and her publications within the traditions of the experimental essay film and performance video. She is interested in how objects circulate via the Internet, in the lives they have now that they could not have lived before. In the film, the artist collects, arranges, and archives her eBay purchases of dated objects according to a logic based upon color, material, vintage, and use.

Digital video, 21:35min, looped

Is finding the perfect matt red lipstick something women should aspire to? Red Film reveals and critiques the persuasive capitalist machinations directed at women to conform and consume. A flurry of quotations from the world’s foremost thinkers address the color-coding of mass-produced consumer goods such as cosmetics, shoes and the red muscle car. All the while, Cwynar hangs upside down turning blue in the face from telling the story over and over again.

Digital video, 24:14min, looped

Upcoming Sara Cwynar Project

A woman is posing and adjusting herself in a photo shoot against a colorful floral background.

installation

Beginning with the commercial production of color in makeup factories, printing plants and fake flower production facilities and then opening up from there to other ideas about truth, perception and standards for women.

The film captures the process of pantyhose making at an unnamed Italian factory.

In her new film, Cwynar combines newly produced video and photographs with found images amassed in her archive. The principal scenes for Baby Blue Benzo were filmed at a studio in Los Angeles, where Cwynar staged a surrealistic shoot—featuring two sets of circular camera tracks—with massive props and elaborate historical costumes that became a kind of stand-in for the artifice and arbitrariness of composing images. The artwork’s central visual pillar is a replica of the titular 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR, which is to date the most expensive car to be sold at auction.