黑料不打烊

ara Cwynar (b. 1985, Vancouver) examines the excess of pictures in today鈥檚 image-saturated culture through a vast archive of visual material, including self-made, commissioned, downloaded, and found photographs. She reuses these images incisively through a collage aesthetic that draws on the visual languages of design and advertising. For the ICA, Cwynar imagined a newly created, two-part project for the museum: a photo-based installation called Alphabet and a related photo mural for the Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall. Alphabet is an installation comprising a constellation of images related to an alphabetical list of terms drawn from internet search engines presented on twenty-six panels. These include words suggested by search engine algorithms in response to Cwynar鈥檚 online activities and some of the most popular search terms since 2020. She explores the terms through an array of associated images, objects, and videos presented around the gallery on panels inspired by German art historian Aby Warburg鈥檚 Mnemosyne Atlas (1925鈥�29). Warburg organized an encyclopedic collection of nearly 1,000 images on black panels to understand recurring visual themes and patterns across time and cultures, from antiquity to the present. Each of Cwynar鈥檚 selected terms connects to contemporary life and ways of seeing that, like Warburg鈥檚 constellations of images, refer to a past that informs their meaning today. For Cwynar, all archives, including the internet, are inflected with human biases and failed aspirations toward objectivity. Even still, as the human impulse to search for answers goes online, Cwynar considers how 鈥減ersonal responses to the world are filtered through a history of images that trails behind us.鈥�