The Scholar’s Study: Still Life
Created and produced by Carol Sawyer
Camera: Erika Annette Rannali and Carol Sawyer
Sound design: Laurance Playford-Beaudet and Carol Sawyer.
The videos and photographs that compriseThe Scholar’s Study were shot while Carol was in the process of clearing out her parents’ house, years after both had died. The contents of her father’s desk drawers and his inventory of plexiglass stands, used to display various objects of study, are the chief protagonists in the work — in essence, a kind of fragmentary and poetic portrait in absentia. The soundtrack of the video The Scholar’s Study: Still life, incorporates audio made by Sawyer’s father in the early 1960’s to accompany an exhibition, in which he directs the listener’s attention to various objects that are not visible in the film – reinforcing the sense of dislocation and loss that infuses the work.
The video Scholar’s Study: Still Life, has been screened at two film festivals and been exhibited in several gallery exhibitions. The video and the related photograph Field Notebook were exhibited in 2018 in the exhibition 13 Ways to Summon Ghosts, curated by Kimberly Phillips. Two additional video components, Office Breathing, and Studio Still Life were completed in 2019, and included in the exhibition The Scholar’s Study at Republic Gallery, along with other related photographs. Two new images were printed in 2022 with the support of a grant from Capture Photography Festival, for inclusion in the exhibition Inherit, curated by Kate Henderson, at the Evergreen Art Gallery in Coquitlam BC.
Exhibition History:
- 2024: Official selection of the San Diego Independent Cinema Awards, award winner in the Best Experimental Film category. San Diego, CA. January 16, 2024.
- 2023: Official selection of the SHORT to the Point Festival, Bucharest, Hungary. September 8, 2023.
- 2022: Inherit, (group exhibition) Curated by Kate Henderson. Evergreen Art Gallery, Coquitlam, BC.
- 2019: The Scholar’s Study, (solo exhibition) Republic Gallery, Vancouver, BC.
- 2018: 13 Ways to Summon Ghosts (group exhibition, catalogue) Curated by Kimberly Phillips. Gordon Smith Gallery, North Vancouver, BC.
Excerpt from the 13 Ways to Summon Ghosts catalogue, text by Kimberly Phillips:
“Scholar’s Study (2018) is a new single-channel video projection that draws from footage Sawyer shot while dismantling the home office of her late father, Alan R. Sawyer, a prominent scholar of pre-Columbian Andean and Peruvian art. It was a task that began more than a decade after his death. Over the course of nearly a year, Sawyer’s camera recorded the slow withdrawal of her father’s presence from a room where he had spent countless hours, as hundreds of historical artifacts, slides, and his library and professional papers, were carefully photographed, catalogued, and archived. Long takes, composed to resemble the genre of still life painting, meditate on the light refracting from the empty Plexiglas supports that once held his objects of study, where now only the armature of meaning remains. As in previous work, Sawyer makes frequent use of seams that run vertically through through the shot, undermining the coherence of the visual field and placing a rupture at the centre of the image. The tactic further intensifies a sense of loss and a longing for our experience of space—and memory—to be reliable, as well as whole. A single photograph accompanies the video, which documents a page from one of Sawyer’s father’s many field notebooks. Like the video itself, the notebook’s sketches of recovered pottery fragments register both an insurmountable absence and the exquisite pleasure of looking closely at the world.”