Vancouver-born multimedia artist Sara Cwynar (b. 1985), MOCA’s Digital Futures Resident, transforms Floor 2 into a hybrid theatre, photo studio, and showroom. Working across photography, film, performance, and a collage-like treatment of space, she disassembles images to reveal the power they exert over personal and collective imagination.
The Canadian premiere of Baby Blue Benzo (2024)—her most ambitious work to date—anchors the exhibition. It begins with the Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR, the most expensive car ever sold at auction, and expands into a research film about the arbitrariness of value and its production. The film also links “Benz” to benzodiazepines—medications commonly prescribed for anxiety and insomnia. Original, stock, and AI-generated imagery scrolls forward and backward, mirroring the relentless feed of daily life. Visible seams and awkward glitches hint at the burden of images and their false promises. Playing within a former auto factory, MOCA’s current home, the film draws pointed connections between photography and its role in manufacturing illusion and advancing capitalism.
Also presented for the first time in Canada, Alpha/Alphabet (2025/26) reconfigures the gallery through custom modular panels inspired by Aby Warburg’s unfinished Mnemosyne Atlas (1925–29). Pulled from terms searched frequently online and Cwynar’s own browsing history, words and phrases like “disinformation,” “new woman,” “plastic,” “wrestle,” and “youth” are translated into visual form. Extending Warburg’s method, Cwynar records recent cultural memory by indexing our collective search for meaning.
Cwynar is the recipient of MOCA’s 2025–26 Digital Futures Residency, which supports the research, production, and refinement of digital artworks. Working with advanced technologies and analogue processes, she examines how these innovations reshape human behaviour, value, and transform meaning. The residency has supported the making of her major solo exhibition at MOCA and will be accompanied by related public programmes, workshops, and learning activities.
About the Artist
Sara Cwynar (Vancouver, BC, 1985) lives and works in New York. Her work in photography, video and installation involves a constant archiving and re-presentation of collected visual materials. For over 10 years she has been evolving her own personal visual language in installation, photography and film, revealing the powerful role that images play in our daily lives. Using dated and contemporary commercial images she exposes the failure, with time, of the visual trickery and the waning of the seductive powers of popular images, and the way the images that once seduced are replaced with new ones in increasingly rapid cycles. She tries to think about who all this material is really for, what latent power dynamics are contained by our images, and how contemporary concepts of freedom, agency and power are tied up and reproduced in images.
Recently, she has expanded her photography work to include moving image and immersive installation. Her most recent exhibition, Baby Blue Benzo, is an overwhelming environment of obsessively constructed images and video.
Cwynar holds an MFA from Yale University and a BDes from York University. Past projects include a commission for the Performa Biennial, New York (2021), “S/S 23”, Foam Photography Museum, Amsterdam (2023) “Apple Red, Grass Green, Sky Blue, ICA Los Angeles (2022)” “Source,” Remai Modern (2021), “L’Image Volée,” Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy (2016); and “Greater New York,” MoMA PS1, Queens, NY (2015/16). Cwynar’s works are held in the collections of The MoMA, New York, the Centre Pompidou, Paris; MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; and the National Gallery of Canada among others. In 2024 and 2025 she will present new solo exhibitions at 52 Walker in New York and ICA Boston in Boston, MA.
