Introduction

Elephant, a project by Sara Cwynar, on the occasion of the artist's residency at the American Academy in Berlin. On view will be new videos, photographs and a drawing.

Cwynar's films and photographs employ a mix of analogue collage, digital modifications and cinematic techniques to create works with a distinct aesthetic, a dense mix of historical references, found images, and traces of contemporary image worlds. Her process includes photographs that are themselves photographed, arranged in real life with everyday objects, re-photographed and filmed or put into motion. The effect closely resembles a kind of visual free association floating in your head—what thought can feel like. 

For her presentation at the gallery, she draws on a project concerning automatons. A small elephant from the late 19th century recurs as symbolic presence. In the anachronistic wound-up toy, a wide web of references coalesces: the object speaks of colonialism and the culture of extraction, its mechanism to industrialization, outsourced labor and automatization, which has brought us to the current developments of AI. With halting steps, the tiny toy becomes a melancholic symbol of the enormous scale of cultural currents that began to form the present a long time ago.

Cwynar’s new film is loosely inspired by the famous 1968/1977 film Powers of Ten by designers Charles and Ray Eames. She reworks its educational approach into an associative sequence of found images, collage, animation, and live-action footage, moving across scales, genres, shapes, colors, and formats. From a mosquito, we travel to Mount Everest and the deepest part of the ocean, from cobalt mines to someone holding an iPhone. Cwynar’s film moves rapidly from the micro to the macro, destabilizing any sense of scale, intentionally confusing the spectator. The insistent slippages of scale in Cwynar’s new works draw on philosopher Timothy Morton’s concept of the hyperobject. The term describes entities or phenomena, such as global warming, that are so widely distributed across time and space that we cannot perceive them in their entirety. We encounter them instead through their effects on our daily lives. 

The film’s monitor is installed on a wooded wall which leaves its back exposed. It is here that we encounter an iPad screening the short video of the Elephant automaton. This promise of revelation by opening the back of the wall finds an analogy in the four photographs on view. Cwynar took images of automata she found in the archive of the New York Public Library Picture Collection—still an largely analogue affair—and uses them as foundation for her collages, layering found and AI-generated images and placing objects on them to create an effect similar to the distortion of a lens. What it is we are looking at, is at first confusing: Re-photographed sections of existing photographs, mixed with other images, the back of a frame superimposed. The frisson of having access to an otherwise hidden view is an illusion.

Cwynar’s works on paper are akin to conceptual notes, with images, drawing, and collage. The drawing on view expands the research and connects the threads that run throughout the exhibited film. The enlarged image of a small figurine of a woman disturbed in her sleep becomes the holder for this information, inscribed with handwritten notes, as objects and images are superimposed. All objects, images or logos are chosen for their connection to the artist's research about environmental decay, philosophy & human understanding of scale, the long trajectory of industrialization into an AI economy.