David Zwirner at 52 Walker in New York City announces its thirteenth exhibition, Baby Blue Benzo, which features work by Canadian-born, New York–based artist Sara Cwynar. This presentation focuses on a new film—for which the show is titled—shot on both digital video and 16mm and projected at monumental scale. To complement Baby Blue Benzo, a series of related photographs will be installed throughout the gallery space.
Engaging with vernacular photography and the moving image, as well as their attendant technologies, Cwynar’s practice—which also includes collage, installation, and performance—explores how pictorial constructs and their related systems of power feed back into real life. Such projects as Rose Gold (2017) and Baby Blue Benzo consider color—namely, how its use and value are constantly renegotiated by the shifting conditions of consumerism, technology, and desire. Drawing from her background in graphic design and a lineage of postwar conceptual photography, Cwynar tampers with visual signifiers to deconstruct notions of power and recontextualize image culture in late capitalism.
In her new film, Cwynar combines newly produced video and photographs with found images amassed in her archive. The principal scenes for Baby Blue Benzo were filmed at a studio in Los Angeles, where Cwynar staged a surrealistic shoot—featuring two sets of circular camera tracks—with massive props and elaborate historical costumes that became a kind of stand-in for the artifice and arbitrariness of composing images. The artwork’s central visual pillar is a replica of the titular 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR, which is to date the most expensive car to be sold at auction.
Baby Blue Benzo is on view through December 21 @ 52 Walker Street, New York City