CAROL SAWYER
A Life in Canadian Art
Carol Sawyer looks disconcertingly like Natalie Brettschneider. You can see it in the mouth, the nose, and most definitely in those questioning, intelligent eyes. Of course, Carol IS Natalie. Or Natalie IS Carol. Our conversation led me to believe that it may be a combination of both.
Regardless, Carol’s work is a natural progression of the feminist work of Suzy Lake and Cindy Sherman, carefully crafting a fictional biography photographically through years of growth, and not just a series of fragmented moments. Carol created the detailed, years-long account of her character, Natalie Brettschneider in the Natalie Brettschneider Archive (NBA).
“My dream as a young girl was to study theatre, singing, and visual art, and do something that combined them…. Everybody told me I couldn’t do that,” says Carol. Her 22year (and counting) project fuses all three elements into a strong narrative that focuses on the history of women in the arts, specifically — in her own words — on “who is included and who isn’t, how different people get forgotten or remembered and the whole role of sexism and identification. It’s playful and funny and invites people in but there’s that serious feminist question at the heart of it.”
Artists can be completely involved in a specific movement or arts community but unless there is someone to write their stories they risk being forgotten. “This is what interested me,” says Carol, “that role of identification and how an artist might be known or unknown. I took that identification to an extreme by inventing her.”
Nathalie Brettschneider became an “excavation tool.” The recent touring exhibition of the NBA (which concluded in Toronto in November 2020) gave Carol an opportunity to draw some work by lesser known women out of gallery collections and show them alongside her images of
Brettschneider. In Toronto she was challenged to explore the fact that “feminism has really moved on and there’s a lot of challenging of feminism to acknowledge the additional barriers to success that queer and racialized women have had [to overcome].”
Carol taught the history of photography on several occasions at Emily Carr University, and this fact shows up in the images she created for the NBA. Many are evocative of the greats (Stieglitz, Lee Miller, Man Ray, Siskin, Avedon, Penn), but Carol insists that they were not conscious references but rather a result of her “super affectionate relationship with all kinds of photographs,” including vernacular and more modernist photos. The word “affection” comes up often when Carol talks about photography.
Carol is conscious of the role of women as models, and very much aware of “how much somebody like Dovima is the author of the image (‘Dovima with Elephants Evening Dress by Dior, Cirque d’hiver, Paris’ by Richard Avedon), but how their part of the creation isn’t considered important.”
Carol has created numerous other small bodies of work between working on the NBA. She says, “One of the common themes in my work … is the relationship between photography and truth and the tension between the document and the lie. Cameras look so truthful. People have this desire to believe in them.
“A lot of my work has used more than one camera. There’s a video I made in 2001 that I shot in a proscenium arch theatre and I couldn’t fit the whole stage in the shot. I shot it with two cameras turned vertically, fixed throughout the video, but it leaves a seam in the middle. All of these fictional things can happen because of the seam. It looks so real because it’s lensbased media so you want to believe in that architectural space.
“Lens-based media invites viewers to participate in an illusion but at the same time they know it’s an illusion. That’s the tension happening in the Brettschneider archive. People encounter their desire for her to be real and long to project certain things onto her.
“I’ve always [got] that feeling of being slightly in the unknown and I think it’s a fertile place for me.”
What’s next? Carol says she hopes that she can put Natalie Brettschneider to rest, but she can’t rule anything out. According to Carol, she carries Natalie around in her head. She is intrigued at the idea of bringing Natalie herself to the stage in a play.
Carol is currently working in a more collaborative process, shooting portraits and videos of performer friends trained in baroque opera. She plans to continue to explore the space of the theatre stage.