Exhibition

Koffler Gallery, 2020
Photo documentation by Toni Hafkenscheid

In The Natalie Brettschneider Archive, Vancouver artist Carol Sawyer assembles a fiction as realistically as possible to tell a needed story. Convincingly manufactured photographs and documentary materials imagine the life and work of a genre-blurring, avant-garde artist leaving a fragmentary imprint through Modernism’s exclusionary account. The archive unfolds chronologically as Sawyer pieces together Brettschneider’s biography to (re)construct a believable artistic forebear, while at the same time creating a narrative device that brings to light buried histories of women’s creative achievements.

Selectively consolidating a monolithic record, the Western art history canon has been shaped by ideological, political, and psychological motivations. Organizing its version of art’s progress into neat categories and clear connections, this framework omits voices and trajectories that complicate or elude patriarchal and Eurocentric assumptions. Unfixed and ever-growing, the Natalie Brettschneider archive is a feminist intervention that ruptures art historical hegemonies, uncovering sidelined stories and perspectives. With each of its iteration, the project shifts focus to research local contexts, enrich perceptions of the past, and unlock a spectrum of divergent futures.

At the Koffler Gallery, Sawyer deepens her examination of Natalie Brettschneider’s historical context and connections to Toronto’s artistic communities. Including both authentic and fabricated archival documents linking Brettschneider’s explorations to actual events, people and places, the project examines photography’s use in sustaining art historical conventions and cultural assumptions about identity, authorship and artmaking. Placing Brettschneider in Toronto at various dates between the mid-1940s and the late 1970s, Sawyer investigates beyond Brettschneider’s struggles and privileges as a 20th-century white woman to foreground some of the queer and racialized women who contributed to the local cultural milieu and the Canadian art scene.

Through a contemporary intervention that prods the foundations of dogmatic narratives, Sawyer exposes a more nuanced array of art histories and disrupts mythologizing views of art and artists. Her acts of subversion aim to enable a fuller understanding and engagement with our living culture, nurturing hope for unfettered futures.

Artist Info

Carol Sawyer is a visual artist and singer. She is grateful to be living and working as an uninvited guest on the unceded ancestral territory of the Coast Salish peoples - Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations.  Since the early 1990’s her visual artwork has investigated the connections between photography and fiction, performance, memory and history. Sawyer studied classical singing, focussing on opera and art song, and trained in extended voice technique with Richard Armstrong. For the past 20+ years she has performed extensively in improvised music contexts. Sawyer graduated with Honours in photography from Emily Carr College of Art and Design (now ECUAD), and earned a Masters in Interdisciplinary Arts from Simon Fraser University, where she studied critical theory, music performance and composition, and acting. She has taught studio and critical studies courses at both SFU and ECUAD. Her artwork is represented by Republic Gallery, Vancouver. To learn more about Sawyer’s practice, visit her website: http://www.carolsawyer.net/