The Approach is pleased to present Baby Blue Benzo by Sara Cwynar. The exhibition will centre on her new film of the same name which combines newly produced video and photographs with found images amassed in her archive. The principal scenes for 'Baby Blue Benzo' were filmed at a studio in Los Angeles, where Cwynar staged a surrealistic shoot — featuring two sets of circular camera tracks — with massive props and elaborate historical costumes that became a kind of stand-in for the artifice and arbitrariness of composing images. The artwork’s central visual pillar is a replica of the titular 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR, which is to date the most expensive car to be sold at auction. Cwynar incorporates filmed representations of herself in the Benz, of hired models and crew, and of friends and collaborators.
This amalgamation of images, all shown at varying scales, is unveiled in a continuous horizontal scroll across an extra-wide screen. The movement structurally suggests the forward progress of certain techno-utopian ideals, though the occasional shift backward hints of its false promises as well.
Cwynar uses the make of this luxury vehicle and the color baby blue as starting points for both the film and the exhibition, and she further links the eponymous Benz to benzodiazepines—medications commonly prescribed for conditions such as anxiety and insomnia, a sleep disorder with which the artist herself struggles. Connecting her intense states of wakefulness to the uninterrupted 24/7 thrum of twenty-first-century life, Cwynar conceptually pairs the advent of photography to the development of the Fordist assembly line, which altered how modern subjects were viewed and how they viewed their own productivity. In 'Baby Blue Benzo', the artist relates these ideas to our shared contemporary reality: the omnipresence of social media and the push toward automation and artificial intelligence. Cwynar collected, over a period of two years, relevant video clips and imagery from archival sources and stock databases and pieced them together along with AI-generated text and visuals.
