News

Sawyer’s film “I attempt from love’s sickness to fly, in vain” screened in Buenos Aires, Argentina, as part of the 2023, 10th Annual Logcinema Art Films Festival, where it won an award for “best experimental” film. 

Sawyer is grateful to the entire team who worked on this film: Stars Catherine Lee (voice) and Patricia Unruh (viola di gamba), Producer: Sharon Kahanoff, Director of Photography and Camera Operator: Pete Hagge, DIT and Sound Recordist: Ian Barbour, Second Camera Operator: Ryan Ermacora, Camera Assistant and Gaffer: Jean Brazeau, Grips: Mackenzie Reid Rostand, Rafay Waqar, Evan Mason, Set Decoration: Kara Hansen and Ruben Möller, Production Assistant: Kara Hansen, Catering: Kathleen Taylor, Wigs and Make-up: Hayley Smith, Production stills: Raymond Lum Inc / Photography (how I wish Ray were still here to celebrate), Assistant Editor: Ryan Ermacora

Post production sound edit, sound design and foley: Nolan McNaughton, Post-production intern and initial colour correction: Yue (Amo) Wang. Post-production, colour correction and digital remastering in 4k and 5k (2022): Susanne Pierce and Ryan Ermacora. Costumes and wigs courtesy Greater Vancouver Historical Performance Society of B.C.

In the spring of 2022 Sawyer was commissioned by SFU Galleries to research and create a podcast about an artwork from their collection, as part of their podcast series Listening to Pictures. Produced in collaboration with sound artist Laurance Playford-Beaudet, our episode responds to a small collage created by the artist May Wilson. You can read all about our piece and the others in the series, and download copies or listen to them online, via the SFU galleries website here.

Kate Henderson, Interim Curator of the Art Gallery at Evergreen, chaired an online panel discussion with three of the artists in the show Inherit on Saturday, April 9, 2022. You can view a recording of the talk online here.

Photographs and video from Sawyer’s series The Scholar’s Study, including two images newly printed courtesy a grant from the Capture Photography Festival, were included in the recent exhibition Inherit, curated by Kate Henderson. In the curator’s words: “The artists in the exhibition – Joi T. Arcand, Zinnia Naqvi, Birthe Piontek, Carol Sawyer, and Vivek Shraya – use video, installation, and photography to examine or re-enact personal histories, pictures, and archives to battle with loss, longing, and identity. The artists in the exhibition propose alternative narratives, both personal and political, to tell interconnected stories of kinship, resiliency, and memory, by exploring and confronting ineffable emotions related to dementia, the pervasive effects of colonialism, and various complexities of gender and family dynamics.“

In spring 2021 Sawyer was invited by NOW society to participate in their Creative Music Series #10, in which she collaborated with musicians in Vancouver, Chicago, and Minneapolis, and sound engineers in Vancouver and Amsterdam, to record a series of improvised trios and sextets. The resulting music videos were incorporated into NOW’s Youtube Channel TV8E, and are available to view on Sawyer’s Vimeo channel.

In August 2021 Sawyer completed Subjoy Ride, a new video based on the poem of the same title, written by Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven in 1920 – 1922, while she was living in New York City. The poem snaps and crackles with collaged ad slogans and the mechanical rhythms of the rapidly modernizing city. Composer Aleksandar Zecevic turned Sawyer’s performance of the text into a vibrant sound score, and Amo Yue Wang assisted with the video editing. The visuals are almost entirely gleaned from historical footage from the Prelinger Archives.

Subjoy Ride was included in the group show The Baroness Elsa Project, curated by Heather Anderson and Irene Gammel. Inspired by the ground-breaking dada poet/ performance artist Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, the exhibition brought together work by Lene Berg, Dana Claxton, ray ferreira, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Wit López, Taqralik Partridge, Sheilah ReStack, Carol Sawyer, and Cindy Stelmackowich. The show premiered at the Carleton University Art Gallery in Ottawa in the fall of 2021, and travelled to the Owens Art Gallery, Mount Allison University, Sackville, NB, from January 29th to April 10th, 2022. Read more about the exhibition here.

Subjoy Ride was subsequently included in a screening July 5th 2022 at the Cinemateque in Vancouver, as part of the Wrong Wave 2022: Symphony of Fire, in conjunction with the Unit Pitt Gallery. Together with Sawyer’s other video based on poems by Baroness Elsa, Bewegung und Novembertag, Subjoy Ride was also included in the online live stream of the Hexannacht Festival, July 23, 2022.

In July 2021 Sawyer was commissioned by NOW Society to create a new music video for TV8E Season 2, Episode 5. The result is a video/ electro acoustic composition based on two short poems by the Dada poet Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Bewegung and Novembertag. The video premiered in July 2021. You can watch the video on Sawyer’s Vimeo channel here.

Read this article featured in PhotoED Magazine‘s Spring/Summer 2021 edition on Carol Sawyer and Natalie Brettschneider written by Walter Markson or Mark Walton.

Carol Sawyer has been longlisted for the prestigious Scotiabank Photography Award. The winner of the 2021 Scotiabank Photography Award will be announced in Spring 2021. The press release, with a list of other nominated artists and the jury, can be read here.

Shadow Puppet is a video installation and group of photographs that document a series of short performances in which Sawyer attaches pieces of cardboard and plastic to her body, effectively turning herself into a life-sized shadow puppet. The characters whose silhouettes are cast on the wall seem to engage in a dialogue with the artist, giving the impression that they are independently animated.

The exhibition runs from June 8 to June 26, 2021 at The Art Centre qathet Public Gallery.

Published and distributed in late 2020, the book Carol Sawyer: The Natalie Brettschneider Archive, was a collaborative project by the Carleton University Art Gallery in collaboration with the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, the Vancouver Art Gallery, and the Koffler Gallery. Featuring articles by Erin Silver, Assistant Professor at UBC’s Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory. as well as writings by Heather Anderson, Curator at CUAG and lead organizer of the book’s production; Michelle Jacques, Chief Curator at the AGGV; Bruce Grenville, Senior Curator at the VAG; and Mona Filip, Director/Curator at the Koffler Gallery. Featuring photographs from the exhibitions through the years and numerous essay contributions, the book can be purchased online through the Vancouver Art Gallery, and the Carleton University Art Gallery.

In conjunction with its continuing exhibition, The Natalie Brettschneider Archive, the Koffler Gallery presents a virtual conversation between multidisciplinary artist Carol Sawyer and Chief Curator of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Michelle Jacques. Sawyer and Jacques have worked together on a past presentation of the Archive in Victoria, and they will discuss the evolution of the project over the years, its adaptation to different institutional and local historical contexts, and its research findings that expand our understanding of the past. Unfixed and ever-growing, the Natalie Brettschneider Archive is a feminist intervention aiming to disturb art historical hegemonies, foregrounding women’s sidelined stories and perspectives.

In this ongoing project, Vancouver artist Carol Sawyer assembles a fiction as realistically as possible to tell a needed story. Convincingly manufactured photographs and documentary materials imagine the life and work of a genre-blurring, avant-garde artist leaving a fragmentary imprint through Modernism’s exclusionary narrative.

The Natalie Brettschneider Archive opened at the Koffler Gallery in Toronto, ON. Exhibition closed on Sunday, November 15th, 2020. An interactive PDF was created for the show, which can be viewed here.

In Carol Sawyer’s video installation Proscenium, a seemingly ordinary vaudeville stage becomes the site for an exploration of illusion and performance.

Characters come onto the stage to perform, their activities recorded by two separate cameras. Each perspective overlaps, creating a space that appears to be continuous; but this truthful appearance is disrupted by events which transpire around the seam where the two frames meet. Proscenium is a playful foray into the construction of images, historical narrative, fiction, truth, and disguise.

The video is on view at the Surrey Art Gallery from February 15, 2020 to February 14, 2021.

Tilt / Shift by Koffler Digital published essays of four artists exploring ideas surrounding self-portraiture. Mariam Magsi, Shelley Niro, Kosisochukwu Nnebe and Carol Sawyer consider the implications (political or otherwise) of constructing one’s own representation through photography, grappling with subjectivity, performance and visuality.

Watch the performance from Recital: Carol Sawyer, Lisa Cay Miller, Elisa Thorn and Katie Rife, the Musical Repertoire from the Natalie Brettschneider Archive, presented in collaboration with NOW Society, in conjunction with the exhibition “Carol Sawyer: The Natalie Brettschneider Archive” at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

Archivaria featured an exhibition review of Sawyer’s The Natalie Brettschneider Archive at the Vancouver Art Gallery that ran from October 28, 2017 to February 4, 2018, written by Alexandra Wieland.

The article can be found here.