Book Review: ‘Glass Life’ by Sara Cwynar
Published by Aperture in July 2021, Hardcover / 10.75 x 8 inches / 200 Pages
“It is inevitably oneself that one collects”
Sara Cwynar’s monograph, Glass Life, is striking from the moment one encounters its spine on a shelf. It would not be out of place with bound periodicals in a library. It’s vibrant red leatherette, matching fore-edges, and white stamped text create an immediate relationship with the aesthetic of the ‘archive’. The cover, with its glossy, hyper-saturated studio images of roses tipped-in, vaguely recalls a 1980s photo album in its style, though initially it’s hard to place why.
Cwynar’s fascination with color, and particularly with understanding color as relating a time period, is evident throughout Glass Life. Even the endpapers of the book, bright blue in color, seem to come straight from the seventies, and connect with the seamless background on which Cwynar photographs her objects in Soft Film.
The “informal trilogy” of Cwynar’s films forms the book’s structure. Like her films, the book is composed of layers upon layers of information and images. Each film has its own introductory explanation, within which a glossy, magazine-like signature provides stills of the imagery in the films, forming something like a dossier. Next, the film’s transcript is accompanied by specific images relating to the film’s narration and pacing.
Sara Cwynar, Tracy (Cézanne), 2017, from Glass Life (Aperture, 2021). © Sara Cwynar
The thread that runs through all three films is hyperawareness, high-anxiety. Highlighted words branch off into images and footnotes, sometimes spilling into the next page, dribbling into personal narratives, or suspending us in relevant theoretical texts. In her interview with Rose Bouthillier, Cwynar herself acknowledges this uneasiness: “There’s a real anxiety in accumulating for me, and an extra heightened anxiety in the fact that accumulating digital material doesn’t take up any physical space, that there is almost no excuse not to document every moment and thought and piece of information; it becomes harder and harder to just let something go. This is a big mental weight.”
Through the layering of text and object, and through color associations, the objects that Cwynar focuses on stand in for ideas and processes – for, as she says, the immaterial. The objects she investigates are beautiful, but often mundane – from a discarded velvetine jewelry box in Soft Film, to faded melamine dishware in Rose Gold, to a plastic glove-hanger in Red Film. Each object is photographed against a single-color backdrop – notably red, green, and blue, the primary colors of the visible light spectrum. In this way, Cwynar’s work is particularly thoughtful of its media – film and photography.
Throughout the book, there is a subtle recurring theme of bright pink and green page flags, usually used as a way of indicating a signature page in a document. Even the font face in which the book is written, a not-overly-friendly sans-serif, has a corporate feeling about it – like discovering an archive of junk from an employee’s desk thirty years on, rife with acetate flags, dog-eared folders, and the occasional company photograph.
Cwynar’s occupation with color, with ephemera, with the emotional attachments that human beings form to objects, are all placed on display in Glass Life. As the title suggests, these all work in a delicate balance, contributing to a sense of self for the viewer. Though the objects might hold memories, they fail to describe them, to make them legible to others; “objects are bad memories,” as Cwynar points out in Soft Film.
Sara Cwynar, Film still from Soft Film, 2016, from Glass Life (Aperture, 2021). © Sara Cwynar
At the conclusion of each film’s transcript live a number of still images, often chaotic affairs constructed from art historical documents, original photographs, paper dolls, and photographic equipment usually hidden from view. The full-bleed color photographs assemble the bad memories contained in these objects, often in relationship to models, positioned in stiff, stock-photo positions, as undulating color fields of debris and ephemera drape themselves throughout Cwynar’s imagined landscape. The results are dizzying, with handwritten notes and images split between two spreads, forcing a forward-backward method of looking.
This is the true genius of Glass Life. “What is remembered in your body is well remembered,” echoes the narration in Red Film. By placing us in a world of objects, asking us to look twice at items we might otherwise not register, Sara Cwynar makes us think through our bodies and their actions, extending the self into all that it interacts with.
Sara Cwynar, Virginia from SSENSE.com in the Pink Rose Prada Skirt, 2020, from Glass Life (Aperture, 2021). © Sara Cwynar
Visit Aperture to purchase Sara Cwynar’s ‘Glass Life’
Bibliography:
Cwynar, S., & Bouthillier, R. (2021). “Keep Your Images Close,” Sara Cwynar—Glass life (First edition). Aperture.
