Sara Cwynar — Portfolio — Slash Paris

Marilyn features Red Film, the third film in a trilogy exploring how desire manifests through objects. Taking the tone and structure of an educational film, Red Film critiques capitalism’s persuasive, constant pressure to conform and consume; questioning the effects of this torrent on the self; and pointing to the use of ‘high art’ to sell aspirational merchandise. The film avoids drawing any conclusions but rather tries to recreate how it feels to be a human in relationship to intensified 21st century media culture. Centred around several objects and ideas—Cezanne brand jewellery boxes and Cezanne brand makeup, red commodities such as lipstick, contemporary red Comme des Garçons clothing, and a 1985 mustang convertible, Red Film combines footage of a makeup factory, dancers, a famous Rubens painting and the red convertible in a photo studio. The film touches on notions of truth and appearance, about our cultural insistence on connecting beauty with truth, and what one can know about someone’s inside character by looking at the outside. In Red Film, Cwynar speaks through a proxy’s voice while hanging upside down, with the inside of her body pressing on the outside. The narration for these scenes is written in the style of ‘influencer’ Instagram captions — declarative, at times insightful, and often narcissistic. Throughout, ideas and theories, and even ways of talking, are shown to be as easily reproducible as commodities—how theory and even language can become kitsch.

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For the series “In the eye of …”, “Pompidou”: https: //www.centrepompidou.fr/lib/Dans-l-oeil-de asked contemporary artists, working with photography, confined in Paris, Lyon, Berlin or New York, to talk about their work. They each responded in their own way, with their words, in their current environment. These responses are as diverse as their approach to photography.