By Olivia Flanz
Sara Cwynar is a contemporary artist from Vancouver, Canada and is currently living in New York City. She specializes in photography collage. In the past month, not one, but two exhibits of hers have come to the Institute of Contemporary Art.
Her first exhibit can be found the moment you walk into the lobby, on the sandra and gerald fineberg art wall. The colorful mural is a collage of photographs from luxury cars, to everyday objects, to logos, and everything in between.
The art wall serves an introduction to the second exhibit in the gallery upstairs. Titled “Alphabet” the gallery features twenty-sex panels, each labeled with a word starting A through Z. Through these installations, Cwynar examines the overwhelming consumption of information on the internet.
The format of the exhibit was inspired by the German Art Historian, Aby Warburg, and their idea of the Mnemosyne Atlas, a visual study on the afterlife of antiquity by using photographs, drawings, and motifs. In “Alphabet” Sara adopts the same method to explore her own theme.
The installations were organized by Mannion Family Curator, Jeffery De Blois, and curatorial assistant, Max Gruber. Max has been working at the Institute of Contemporary Art for over a year, and Sara’s exhibition is the fourth installation he’s worked on at the ICA.
Max described Sara’s exhibit as a collection that recreates “structure of these upright panels with these collages and these sort of like seemingly disparate images together would be a really exciting way to sort of explore ideas related to the way the algorithm suggests new ideas for us to either consume or explore, and the way that we just kind of move through the world and are like constantly bombarded by images and ideas at a rate that just wouldn't have been possible earlier.”
Max explains how Sara uses humor to show the way algorithms organize the general public’s desire and control trends.
“It's supposed to be funny and scary at the same time…like it's genuinely kind of mind blowing to see some of the advertising strategies or ways that images have been altered or sort of marketed specifically to certain groups of people and so she doesn't need to like reach into a fantastical dreamscape like you might think surrealist art does. Really it's just sort of showing how absurd and surreal our actual life online is.”
“Alphabet” will stay in the gallery until August 3rd and Sara’s college on the art wall will stay up on the art wall until September 7th. To stay updated on new exhibits coming to the Institute of Contemporary art go to www.icaboston.org.
