Created and produced by Carol Sawyer
Camera: Erika Annette Rannali and Carol Sawyer
Sound design: Laurance Playford-Beaudet and Carol Sawyer.
The Scholar’s Study is comprised of video and photographs taken while Carol was clearing out her parents’ house, years after both had died. The contents of her father’s desk drawers and his inventory of plexiglass stands, used to display various objects of study, are the chief protagonists in the work — in essence, a kind of fragmentary and poetic portrait in absentia.
The video Scholar’s Study: Still Life, and the photograph Field Notebook were exhibited in 2018 in the exhibition 13 Ways to Summon Ghosts, curated by Kimberly Phillips, at the Gordon Smith Gallery in North Vancouver. New video components, Office Breathing, and Studio Still Life were completed in 2019, and included in the exhibition at Republic Gallery, along with additional photographs. Two new images were printed in 2022 with the support of a grant from Capture Photography Festival, for inclusion in the exhibition Inherit, curated by Kate Henderson, at the Evergreen Art Gallery in Coquitlam BC.
Exhibition History:
2022: Inherit, Curated by Kate Henderson. Evergreen Art Gallery, Coquitlam, BC.
2019: The Scholar’s Study, Republic Gallery, Vancouver, BC.
2018: 13 Ways to Summon Ghosts, curated by Kimberly Phillips at the Gordon Smith Gallery in North Vancouver.
From the 13 Ways to Summon Ghosts catalogue, text by Kimberly Phillips:
“Scholar’s Study (2018) is a new single-channel video projection that draws from footage Sawyer shot while dismantling the home office of her late father, Alan R. Sawyer, a prominent scholar of pre-Columbian Andean and Peruvian art. It was a task that began more than a decade after his death. Over the course of nearly a year, Sawyer’s camera recorded the slow withdrawal of her father’s presence from a room where he had spent countless hours, as hundreds of historical artifacts, slides, and his library and professional papers, were carefully photographed, catalogued, and archived. Long takes, composed to resemble the genre of still life painting, meditate on the light refracting from the empty Plexiglas supports that once held his objects of study, where now only the armature of meaning remains. As in previous work, Sawyer makes frequent use of seams that run vertically through through the shot, undermining the coherence of the visual field and placing a rupture at the centre of the image. The tactic further intensifies a sense of loss and a longing for our experience of space—and memory—to be reliable, as well as whole. A single photograph accompanies the video, which documents a page from one of Sawyer’s father’s many field notebooks. Like the video itself, the notebook’s sketches of recovered pottery fragments register both an insurmountable absence and the exquisite pleasure of looking closely at the world.”