Guyton\Walker & Sara Cwynar

Post Times is pleased to present its first exhibition, featuring two multi-part artworks by Guyton\Walker and Sara Cwynar. These artists share a similar approach to creating image-based work that has a sculptural sensibility, each beginning with appropriated source images that are then manipulated with a range of analogue and digital means to create their own visual language, in a process that is at times self-cannibalizing. Both works straddle the line between chaos and order, creation and destruction, philosophy and spoof.

Guyton\Walker’s Untitled, 2006, consists of 106 paint cans adorned with inkjet printed labels made by the artist duo. The paint can is a signature form present in nearly all of Guyton\Walker’s exhibitions, and occasionally the source for images that are later printed on other raw materials - tables, mattresses, drywall, billboards, or curtains. Guyton\Walker’s anarchic process begins with the flatbed scanner, using source material that alludes to commerce and advertising culture, including gothic Ketel One vodka ads; the logo of a Swiss electrical components manufacturer; a Swiss private jet company ad, a modern furniture ad, a Gatorade bottle, along with physical objects like a Swiss Army Knife, masking tape, kitchen knives, and sliced fruit. A photo from Fischli & Weiss’s Equilibres series is a recurring element, referencing another iconic artist duo while also providing imagery that mirrors the precarious nature of how the paint cans are stacked. The scanned imagery is then manipulated and layered in Photoshop, before being printed on photo paper and wrapped around a store-bought gallon paint can. Calling to mind Warhol’s Factory, the works have a complex relationship to ideas around authorship and authenticity, their paint can armature suggesting a sense of humor and self-reflexivity that questions their own status as artworks.