Sara Cwynar is a Canadian artist based in New York City, working across photography, film, installation, and performance. She holds a BDes from York University and an MFA from Yale University. Her practice examines how images shape desire, memory, and systems of value. Drawing on techniques of accumulation, collection, and montage, she works with found images, commercial ephemera, and everyday objects, reconfiguring them into meticulously staged compositions in photography and film. Her work explores the instability of images and the cultural frameworks through which meaning is produced and circulated. Her films—including Rose Gold (2017), Red Film (2018), and Glass Life (2021)—extend these concerns through layered combinations of text, voice, and archival material. Across media, Cwynar interrogates the visual languages of advertising and mass media; in doing so, she situates the act of looking as both a cultural and political condition, asking how images come to define what—and how—we see. Cwynar has exhibited widely at international biennials, film festivals, and major institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, MMK Frankfurt, and Centre Pompidou. She is the recipient of numerous honors, including a Guggenheim Foundation Award, and her work is held in prominent public collections.
At the Academy, Cwynar is developing a research-based video essay and installation focused on the figure of the automaton. Defined as mechanical devices designed to imitate human beings, automatons represent early expressions of artificial intelligence—embodying the idea that human cognition could transfer to nonhuman forms. Cwynar’s project explores the automaton’s relationship to images and to notions of visual “truth,” while also engaging the intertwined histories of photography and capitalism. Since the Industrial Revolution, photography and
capitalism have evolved together, shaping systems of representation, circulation, and value. By tracing these parallel trajectories, Cwynar’s project shows how their convergence continues to structure contemporary ways of seeing.
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Hakim Abderrezak
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