Flat Death – Sara Cwynar

After a career in the graphic design, the Canadian artist Sara Cwynar experiments now with photography, installation and collage, techniques that allow her to obsessively accumulate images taken from the pop culture – which she defines ‘vernacular’ – and successively to modify, merge them with other materials, and reinvent them in new compositions. The works of the project Flat Death, for instance, were all created from images taken from magazines, books, and webpages; these visual objects have then been scanned, enlarged, modified with Photoshop and, finally, reprinted as photography. The final product is an harmonious mix of old and new, of originality and manipulation.

‘Organizing and manipulating my archive of saved materials in the studio is a way of controlling the world through images, organizing chaos, taking a small slice of the world and reworking it under my own terms.’ (The New Yorker, September 2013)

Sara Cwynar, Girl From Contact Sheet 2 (Darkroom Manual), 2014.

© Sara Cwynar 2014.