BOSTON, MASS.- On February 13, 2025, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (ICA) unveils an ambitious two-part exhibition from New York-based artist Sara Cwynar (b. 1985, Vancouver). Cwynar is creating a floor-to-ceiling, photo collage billboard for the Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall in the ICA’s lobby, as well as an installation in the Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser Gallery on the fourth floor, marking the first time an artist has worked simultaneously in these two spaces at the ICA. The photo-based exhibition builds on the artist’s longstanding investigation of the relationship between images and the construction of selfhood in the digital era. Organized by Jeffrey De Blois, Mannion Family Curator, with Max Gruber, Curatorial Assistant, Sara Cwynar is on view from Feb. 13 to Aug. 3, 2025.

Cwynar’s densely layered photographs, films, and installations employ the visual languages of design and advertising to explore themes of seduction, desire, and commodification. Her practice of constant archiving and re-presentation of collected visual materials recalls advertisements, retail catalogues, and old history books. These visual assemblages invite viewers to consider how life online increasingly structures our perceptions of the world, and how these perceptions can change through time and contextual manipulation. Her work interrogates how the dizzying velocity with which images circulate today online conceals systems of control embedded in our everyday lives.

“Cwynar is one of the most exciting contemporary artists working with photography to emerge in the last several years,” said De Blois. “Her meticulously assembled artworks take on pressing questions around the ways in which human biases are implicit in technologies, how photography works in lockstep with capitalism, and, against the backdrop of the proliferation of images online, how we understand who we are and want to be today.”

Upon entering the ICA, visitors will first see Cwynar’s floor-to-ceiling, site-specific billboard created for the Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall. The billboard is a visual index of an alphabetical list of terms pulled from the media in the last few years. Some words are more personal, such as terms suggested by search engine algorithms responding to the artist’s online activities, and others are more universally common search terms. The terms are represented in the artwork by commonplace image types from advertising: the reclining woman, the domestic object, perfect looking food, familiar logos, luxury cars, and more. Although the form of the artwork is guided by principles of billboard design, nothing is clearly for sale: what is being “advertised” is an overview of our contemporary moment as seen through seductive images suggesting a generalized desire.

Upstairs, the alphabetical list of terms is expanded into an immersive photo-based installation. Each term is accompanied by an array of associated images, objects, or videos presented around the gallery on panels inspired by German art historian Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas (1925–29). Warburg organized an encyclopedic collection of nearly 1,000 images on black panels to understand and contextualize recurring visual themes and patterns across time and cultures, from antiquity to the present. Cwynar similarly combines each term with a corresponding visual, connecting each term to contemporary life. 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 moves online, Cwynar considers how “personal responses to the world are filtered through a history of images that trails behind us.”

Sara Cwynar (b. 1985, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada) is interested in the way that images accumulate, endure, and change in value over time. Her conceptual photographs and films involve constant archiving and re-presentation of collected visual materials, layering diverse imagery with references to art theory. The works intricately recall advertisements, retail catalogues, and old art history textbooks. Her visual assemblages meditate on how vernacular images shape collective world views, and how those ideals can change through time and contextual manipulation. Cwynar was one of the recipients of the 2020 Sobey Art Award, the 2020 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, and the 2021 Shpilman Photography Prize. She earned her Bachelor of Design from York University in 2010 and her MFA from Yale University in 2016. In 2014, she was awarded the Printed Matter Emerging Artists Publication Series and published her first monograph, entitled Kitsch Encyclopedia, with Blonde Art Books. A monograph of Cwynar’s work, entitled Glass Life, was published in 2021 by Aperture with the Remai Modern.