The Brooklyn Rail

Sara Cwynar’s latest exhibition, on view at 52 Walker, embraces the creative power of exhaustion. Inspired by her own insomnia, Cwynar debuts Baby Blue Benzo (all artworks 2024), a 21-minute film—her longest yet—shot on both 16mm film and digital video, in an enclosed structure at the center of the gallery. The makeshift theater creates a roundabout corridor in the room where a series of photographs is installed, some pictures in multi-panel arrangements, others unframed and tacked directly to the theater’s exterior. Posters of blown-up stock images are pinned and taped to the walls like giant billboards pieced together by modular components. Bright colors radiate from photographic collages of the film’s models and props: a Ferrari in MoMA’s collection, a pink peony, and countless other images sourced from the internet and Cwynar’s personal archive. In an age where artificial imagery tests our perceptions of reality, the works raise questions about the production of value and desire in an image-saturated world.

Two years in the making, the film Baby Blue Benzo transforms sleepless distraction into a full-scale scrutiny of our contemporary image economy. Projected on two channels, the film seamlessly scrolls horizontally across an extra-wide screen in a novel animation style. The script begins with a male narrator (the voice of Paul Cooper, who has previously narrated Cwynar’s films) describing his own fantasy image when he can’t sleep: the 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR, the most expensive car ever sold at auction to date. The car quickly becomes a recurring motif and an object of desire that drives the film. The ensuing sequence of newly produced and found imagery, coupled with AI-generated visuals and sounds that cue various moods, can feel as surreal as a dream, if not a lucid state of exhausted alertness. Models and Cwynar’s film crew pose with props and costumes as if for an editorial campaign; traffic crosses the Manhattan Bridge, seen through the film grain’s nostalgic texture; ice skaters perform as if in competition; and Pamela Anderson makes a cameo, posing assuredly over a rousing punk baseline. 

Cwynar herself appears in the film, both on camera and in voiceover alongside the primary narrator. Early on, she connects the Benz to benzodiazepines, giving the film title its cheeky punch. She asserts her presence most forcefully when climbing into the Benz—not the prototype that sold for a record-setting price, but its only other comparable counterpart at Germany’s Mercedes-Benz Museum—clad in a Ferrari red racing suit. Over a hyperpop Charli XCX track, she grabs the steering wheel and later traces the Mercedes-Benz logo with her fingers. She alludes to a popular music video trope when posing in front of the car, assuming control when she stakes a claim to its publicity image in a voiceover. It’s a memorable scene that exposes the Benz’s appeal as a product of its own reproduction, stressing the depth to which its image configures the narrator’s desire.

The color blue features strongly, as do red, green, and yellow. In concentrating on baby blue, Cwynar not only addresses gender-based marketing as an arbiter of value, but she evokes a color often recognized to inspire feelings of trust. Complete with blue carpeting, the exhibition coaxes us to trust the images we see, or at least reminds us that what we see informs what we accept as truth. Encyclopedia Grid (Weather), reprising a 2014 series, explores this very question. Cwynar’s finger appears to press individual images against a fiery red background sharpened by the pale blue wall behind it: gray and blue cloud formations fall into, mostly, disastrous fires toward the bottom of a loosely arranged grid. Anchored by a horizontal yellow ruler, the composition seems to document shifting associations with the weather over time, hinting at the power of images to shape our definitive sources of knowledge. 

Another photograph, Apple on Sky I, underscores the exhibition’s digital surrealism most succinctly. In it, a crisp red apple—an age-old symbol of human temptation—floats against a cloudy blue sky, calling to mind Magritte as much as Apple Inc. It hangs in a black metal frame with custom white inscriptions along its interior edges, resembling the edge markings on film; nearby, Cwynar installs five similarly framed photographs side-by-side as if to unspool a strip of film around a gallery corner.

With Baby Blue Benzo, Cwynar manages to untangle the impulses provoked by the mass circulation of images online today, which rivals a scale that even Warhol couldn’t anticipate. The exhibition design encourages visitors to circle the gallery before entering the theater, as if witnessing a product assembly line of photographs manufacturing the film in real time. After my visit, I circled the loop one more time before re-entering to watch the film again, this time drawn even closer to a cache of images I’d seen minutes before.