Color Coordination, to the Point of Obsession

If you’re a collector of some sort, chances are you’ll appreciate Sara Cwynar’s project “Accidental Archives.” Using objects that she accumulated over the course of a decade, Cwynar has sorted them out by color, and photographed them on a background of the same shade. The result is a series of somewhat eerie still lifes, in which all sorts of things compete for attention with each other. My favorite might be the green one, in which the jaw of some scaly creature finds itself next to a can of soda, and a few plants. It’s actually not the first time that we’ve seen a photography project which groups together objects of similar colors; back in April, we wrote about JeongMee Yoon’s “The Pink & Blue Project,” which looks at the way that color has come to be associated with gender. Cwynar’s project is a little more personal in nature than Yoon’s, but it also shows the way we hoard objects today.

This work is on display at Toronto’s Cooper Cole Gallery until August 18.