KATHERINE MCMAHON
Habitat is a weekly series that visits with artists in their workspaces.
This week’s studio: Sara Cwynar; Sunset Park, Brooklyn. I met Sara Cwynar on a humid day in July at her studio on the third floor of a warehouse building near the Gowanus Bay. The space is only temporary for her since she is heading back to Yale to complete her MFA at the end of the month. It’s surprising that she’s only been in the space since June since it’s full of countless trinkets and objects. “It looks like I’ve been here a lot longer,” she admitted. “I got a car when I moved to New Haven and I can get so much more stuff now. Until last year, I used to carry suitcases on the subway filled with materials.” Cwynar tends to buy her source material from dollar stores, drug stores, eBay, and, recently, candlestock.com, a candle company based in Woodstock, New York. Photographing those objects and combining them with found images through rephotography and collage, she makes intricate, otherworldly still lifes, which she has shown at Cooper Cole in Toronto and Foxy Production in New York.
Cwynar studied English Literature and Political Science before graduating with a bachelor’s degree in Graphic Design, which continues to inform her process. She then went on to work as a designer at The New York Times Magazine before shifting her focus to an MFA. “I’m not a morning person, so normally I’m here from around 12 to 9 or so. Sometimes I’ll stay here all night,” she said. “I don’t have internet in this studio, which is good, but not being able to procrastinate at all can also feel really daunting.” Cwynar is currently preparing for an upcoming show at Retrospective Gallery in Hudson, New York, in September. In the slide show below, a little insight into her process and her surroundings.
ALL PHOTOS: KATHERINE MCMAHON
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"Some wax I’ve been melting into cartoony blobs for making photos with, I build these palettes out of them and then apply them to photographs."
"I use this green felt to get a really nice grey in black-and-white photographs. And I’ve been making pictures of soft flocked jewelry boxes that I collect from eBay. I love the way the boxes age and show use much more than the intended object (the jewelry) that they contained. They also are much more stylized so they date more to certain times."
"Some laser prints that I will make still lifes on top of and then rephotograph for use in other pictures."
"I have been sourcing these Avon presidential cologne bottles from eBay. They’re really interesting in that the values of them fluctuate very drastically based on the seller, and the heads are plastic while the bodies are ceramic so the two parts discolor differently over time. I also just like the idealism of this particular commercial object."
"I’m always collecting postcards of the Twin Towers. I buy one every few days from eBay."
"This is what my studio floor always looks like."
"I use this thing to scrape off the wax blobs once I make them."
"Some source images of carpets that I’m using for an upcoming show at Retrospective in Hudson."
"Some velvet busts, a toucan statue that I’ve had for years, a trade manual image of nail polish that I hope to figure out how to use."
"Big printouts of the small carpet pictures on the studio floor. Trying to figure out what to do with these."
"More of what my studio always looks like! I’ll just pull things out of here and use them."