In 1927, the gravely ill German art historian Aby Warburg began constructing dozens of burlap-laced wooden panels, each devoted to a different theme in the history of Western culture. They ranged from “Astrology and mythology: projections of the cosmos” to “Superlatives of the language of gestures.” To each, he pinned photographs, diagrams, sketches, and other miscellanea, juxtaposing images across centuries.
Warburg was close to death, and so, too, he may have sensed, was the order he was trying to document. He wanted to synthesize the entire cultural history of the West. He called the project the Mnemosyne Atlas, after the Greek goddess of memory. When he died in 1929, he had completed sixty-three panels and assembled nearly a thousand images, with plans for even more.
When the Vancouver-born, Brooklyn-based artist Sara Cwynar first saw the project, she thought of it as a kind of “proto–Google image search,” she tells me. Cwynar—whose photographs, films, and installations are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou, and the National Gallery of Canada—decided to update Warburg’s project for the algorithm era, using search terms popular at the time she was making the work.
The resulting installation, Alpha/Alphabet (2025/26), consists of around two dozen black panels propped up on wooden planks, where Cwynar elucidates terms like “Apple,” “Bank,” and “Climate.” These are everyday words whose meanings have been overtaken: apple by the tech company, bank—which once meant table—by financial institutions, climate by our ongoing catastrophes. Some panels feature pigment prints of Cwynar’s photographs, others low-res images culled from the internet. Beneath a few of the panels, Cwynar has installed three rows of shelves and placed assorted trinkets: Avon aftershave bottles shaped like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln stand below the word “Official.”
I recently saw the work at the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto, where it was exhibited as part of Cwynar’s Canadian debut solo show Baby Blue Benzo Beta. The ascendant artist—who has had shows in Boston and New York City—has been lauded as one of her generation’s sharpest critics of the way algorithms have warped how we see. Like the extraordinary exhibition it’s part of, Alpha/Alphabet is preoccupied with the creation and circulation of images, how the nature of a thing gets flattened when it’s represented visually.
Cwynar was a graphic designer for the New York Times Magazine before getting a Master of Fine Arts in photography from Yale in 2016. She then worked as an art director on commercial shoots. She learned the grammar of our visual language by making it. She would apply many of advertising’s formal strategies to her twenty-one-minute film Baby Blue Benzo (2024), the other piece included in the MOCA Toronto show, running until August 16.
The film can be traced back to May 2022, when a 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR Uhlenhaut Coupe was sold at auction for a record breaking €135 million, a value seemingly so arbitrary and outlandish it drives one to rethink the most basic principles of economics. Such sales are often accompanied by exquisitely produced images that frame the object as singular and priceless. “At the core of the film,” Cwynar says, “is the connection between photography and capitalism.” In other words, you can’t covet a new pair of shoes without first seeing them photographed on a brand’s website.
Cars and figure skaters and baby-blue-clad Pamela Anderson are captured in grainy 16mm and projected on a rectangular screen in a wide format reminiscent of classical Hollywood Cinemascope. Cwynar uses a novel editing effect to present her images: they flit across the frame in a horizontal scroll, like a conveyor belt in a factory. The effect is genuinely vertiginous, sedative, like the benzos of the title, and destabilizing, like the price of the Benz.
