Post Times is pleased to announce its first exhibition, featuring two multi-part artworks by Guyton\Walker and Sara Cwynar. These artists share a similar approach to creating image-based work that has a sculptural sensibility, each beginning with appropriated source images that are then manipulated with a range of analogue and digital means to create their own visual language, in a process that is at times self-cannibalizing. Both works straddle the line between chaos and order, creation and destruction, philosophy and spoof.
Guyton\Walker’s Untitled, 2006, consists of 106 paint cans adorned with inkjet printed labels made by the artist duo. The paint can is a signature form present in nearly all of Guyton\Walker’s exhibitions, and occasionally the source for images that are later printed on other raw materials - tables, mattresses, drywall, billboards, or curtains. Guyton\Walker’s anarchic process begins with the flatbed scanner, using source material that alludes to commerce and advertising culture, including gothic Ketel One vodka ads; the logo of a Swiss electrical components manufacturer; a Swiss private jet company ad, a modern furniture ad, a Gatorade bottle, along with physical objects like a Swiss Army Knife, masking tape, kitchen knives, and sliced fruit. A photo from Fischli & Weiss’s Equilibres series is a recurring element, referencing another iconic artist duo while also providing imagery that mirrors the precarious nature of how the paint cans are stacked. The scanned imagery is then manipulated and layered in Photoshop, before being printed on photo paper and wrapped around a store-bought gallon paint can. Calling to mind Warhol’s Factory, the works have a complex relationship to ideas around authorship and authenticity, their paint can armature suggesting a sense of humor and self-reflexivity that questions their own status as artworks.
Sara Cwynar’s Flat Death, 2014, is a work of 16 chromogenic prints hung side-by-side in simple black frames, akin to a film strip. The images are the result of a circuitous process that starts with physical images sourced from flea markets, darkroom manuals, old encyclopedias, and the New York Public Library Picture Collection. Cwynar then cuts, tapes, scans, warps, reconfigures, rephotographs, and reprints the images, with the material oscillating from image to sculptural installation, and back again. The conceptual starting point for this work is a term Roland Barthes uses in his seminal book, Camera Lucida. “With the photograph,” he wrote, “we enter into flat death.” While collecting and reworking found images was a part of Cwynar’s practice from the initial stages of her career, upon reading Barthes she began to think about his idea in relation to discarded objects and images, and how she could resurrect them. It is important to Cwynar that her images are sourced from the physical world, as they exhibit qualities that are only present in objects, such as outdated printing methods or changes in color due to age. A sense of kitsch, nostalgia, and the element of time quietly underlie this work, but time is also directly referenced with images of a darkroom timer and a display of gold watches. In her selection of images, Cwynar also references the classic tropes of photography – the nature photo, the architectural photo, the still life, the portrait, the product shot.
Guyton\Walker is the collaboration of Tennessee-born, New York-based artists Wade Guyton (b. 1972) and Kelley Walker (b. 1969).
Sara Cwynar (b. 1985) is a native of Vancouver, living and working in New York.