Q & A: Carol Sawyer

Her father’s study became a site to explore memory, history and meaning – and the pleasure of looking deeply at the world.

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The death of elderly parents is one of life’s major transitions. There is grief, sometimes relief, and a brew of other emotions, depending on the family dynamics. This symbolic passing of the generational torch often comes with new responsibilities, including the difficult task of dismantling a household or, in some cases, an archive of work. 

For Vancouver artist Carol Sawyer, this process was particularly loaded. Her American-born father, Alan R. Sawyer, died in 2002. A notable art historian, he specialized in pre-Columbian Andean and Peruvian art and had taught at the University of British Columbia from 1974 to 1984. It fell to her to dismantle the study where he had spent so many hours.

Sawyer found institutional homes for his professional papers and historical objects. But still there was stuff. His desk drawers, for instance, were a repository for gummed labels, old address books, eyeglass cases and a hundred other things that had a peculiar hold on her.

She decided to document the room, photographing the drawers, as well as a bookshelf, a filing cabinet and a field notebook open to a page of his drawings of pottery sherds. 

She also made three videos using various objects, including his Plexiglas artifact stands. They catch the study's shifting light, hovering between abstraction and realism as Sawyer experiments with different filmic techniques.

The soundtrack for one video, The Scholar's Study: Still Life, includes excerpts from a recording of her father describing objects in an exhibition he curated for the Guggenheim, as well as snippets of Sawyer and fellow filmmaker Erika Annette Rannali marvelling as the room’s ethereal light yields sublime images of subtle beauty. 

Kimberly Phillips, in an essay for 13 Ways to Summon Ghosts, an earlier group show at the Gordon Smith Gallery in North Vancouver that included some of this work, notes that Sawyer’s long takes resemble still-life paintings, although their sense of reality is disrupted.

“As in previous work, Sawyer makes frequent use of seams that run vertically through the shot, undermining the coherence of the visual field and placing a rupture at the centre of the image," writes Phillips. "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.”

Visually, the work is distinct from one of Sawyer’s best-known projects, The Natalie Brettschneider Archive, an account of a fictive Canadian artist who participated in the French avant-garde between the two world wars. But this latest project shares common strategies with that body of work, evoking what Sawyer’s father told her of his scholarly process, which he compared to “being a detective” – gathering clues and piecing together fragments in an effort to understand the past. 

I spoke with Carol Sawyer by telephone about her exhibition, The Scholar’s Study, on view at the Republic Gallery in Vancouver from Sept. 5 to Oct. 6, 2019. The following excerpts from our conversation have been edited lightly for clarity.

Tell me about your father.

He was born in 1919. He had very bad eyesight and it wasn’t until he started school that people realized he couldn’t see the blackboard and he’d just been winging it. He had a good memory so nobody had figured out that he actually couldn’t see well. He had a very difficult-to-correct eyeglass prescription.

He told me that when he first saw the world in focus it was just super-overwhelming, like really amazing. I think that was a very formative experience for him because then he built his whole life about looking very carefully at things and appreciating them. He was just super-fascinated with examining things. 

He was a very good draftsman and he wanted to become an artist, and that met with a lot of resistance from his father. And then, after the Second World War, he went to art school because he had the GI Bill. He had memorized the eye chart to pass the pilot’s exam and became a reconnaissance pilot, which is really ironic. He went to art school, and then he got degrees in art history. 

That sense of visual curiosity and love of looking was something he gave me that I’m very grateful for. I didn’t go into this project knowing that. But making the work really brought that home for me.

What was your motivation for this project? Was it some internal need that drove you or was it more cognitive, a recognition that making art using the daily working materials of an art historian could make an interesting, almost circular or self-referential portrait in absentia?

It’s hard for me to disentangle it at this point because there was such a slow metabolism to this project. I think there are a number of personal and emotional, as well as rational and cognitive, things that drove this project. 

It was just a really visually interesting space, for one thing, and then I was interested in the weird metaphorical layers. Taking apart the study was like this archaeological process, and there was a lot of archaeological material. And I was thinking about conversations that I had with my father over the years about what his job was, how he saw what he was doing. It just seemed like a rich way to pull it apart. 

It was recognizing too that a lot of people I knew, who were about my age, were faced with some kind of similar dilemma, where they were dismantling a parent’s home and having to cope with a huge amount of stuff. So I recognized there was something there that was accessible to maybe more people – that the project wasn’t just personal, it would have importance for other people.

How did the complex emotions associated with this transition inform and enrich your project?

It really helped me understand better my relationship with my father in terms of the gifts he had given me. It made me appreciate him in a different way because our relationship was actually quite difficult. 

Towards the end of his life, he had Alzheimer’s and our relationship transformed quite a bit through that. I saw this authority figure drop away and I could see his vulnerability. I got a sense of who he was under that persona. I think a lot a lot of the conflicts I had with him were because he had this big persona. He had a bit of an ego and he needed a lot of attention. 

But then he really needed us when he had Alzheimer’s. It was like: “Are you a safe person or are you an unsafe person? Do you have expectations of me that I can’t fulfill or do you accept me?” It was really challenging, but also kind of an amazing process to go through with him. 

The thing that never left him was that excitement at looking at the world. That was so important, and a deep part of him. He would say: “Look!” At, like, a squirrel in a tree, or something. He would just get so excited about it. 

So he became a bit fragmented. Parts of him became less accessible. It was almost like an excavation, where parts of his constructed self seemed to drop away. And, then, who was he after that?

I look into your father’s desk drawer – the one with the magnifying glasses and old eyeglass cases – and feel a sharp stab of recognition. It’s like I’m looking again into the desk of my late father. How did you select what to include and what to exclude?

I had a deadline to clear the house and I was working, finally, with a professional organizer. And she’s like: “Oh, this will be easy. I’ll just throw all this stuff out.” And I was like: “No!” I had such a strong emotional reaction. I didn’t want to disturb those desk drawers. And I thought, well, that’s interesting. So I photographed them. 

A lot of the photographs were about how beautiful the light was in the room. It’s kind of a cheesy metaphor for the fleetingness of life. But, really, it works. The light was so beautiful, I’d be literally like: “Oh, my God.” 

It was late fall, early winter, and it would be like that for a minute and then it would be gone. It’s that elusive, transient nature of time and light. It can break your heart if you think about it. And the idea of the shadow – it’s a bit of an old metaphor. 

And, then, because it felt very close to me, I showed the images to some people I trust and said: “OK, which ones are you responding to?” I wasn’t sure about the desk drawers and a lot of people went: “Oh, my God, the desk drawers.” So that led to me include them.

One challenge with a project like this, I imagine, is dealing with nostalgia. What are your views on nostalgia and how did you negotiate that?

I have a problem with nostalgia. Nostalgia can often go with a kind of idealizing, glossing over or minimizing the difficulty of something. I didn’t feel particularly nostalgic.

My dad was quite nostalgic and it used to annoy me because I’d feel like he would paper over things, or not admit how difficult something was. I’d be like: “Yeah, well, he must have thought it was all great, but that wasn’t so great for me.” We’d had a lot of conflicts when I was growing up, where I felt he just wouldn’t acknowledge how difficult things were at the time. 

So I prefer to think of myself as not nostalgic. But I’m still interested that objects can have this pull on you. And, of course, as artists we count on that. We want to make objects that will evoke some kind of emotional resonance, that people will want to revisit, that will fill people with desire. We’re counting on that, if only to get people to spend time with the work, to think about it. 

Idealizing seems to me to be a simplifying, or an editing. I’m interested in trying to find ways to open up the complexity of something, enough that people can bring their own experience to it. 

Your previous work has revolved around connections between the documentary and the fictional, as well as memory and history, particularly through The Natalie Brettschneider Archive. How does The Scholar’s Study fit within your overall body of work?

On the surface, it looks quite different from the Natalie Brettschneider work, which is a very eclectic body of mostly black-and-white photographs, staged performative actions and mimicking of an archive. It has a different feel to it. And this project, on the surface, especially the photographs, is a fairly straight, documentary kind of photography. The videos are a bit odder. 

I think there are parallels. The Natalie Brettshneider Archive is a really complicated thing that is made up of all these different components that, together, have built these weird narrative threads and stories.

There’s a lot of critique of art history in it and how the narratives of art history might have excluded people – what is art, what isn’t art. There are a lot of layers to that piece, partly because I’ve had the luxury of working on it for 20 years. So it has constantly evolved through all these conversations and collaborations. 

This piece is much more contained. It’s about this one place and my process of unpacking it and thinking about who my dad was. So it’s a very different kind of project. But there’s still this element, especially in the videos, of piecing things together. 

There’s a relationship in a lot of my work between realism and the non-real. So you’re drawn into this illusionistic space, but the scene boots you back out again and you’re reminded this is a constructed image. The same thing happens in the Brettschneider archive. 

After my father died and my mother sold their home, and then again after her death, I felt an impulse to preserve their material history. I ended up with boxes and boxes stored in my apartment. For a while, it was hard to move around. My brother was less sentimental and simply carted things off to the dump. I kept rescuing stuff, including things I still use to this day. In a sense, I think I’m working my way through their physical archive in a tangible way.

Making digital images seems less physically cumbersome, yet there is something powerful about the materiality of actual objects. I’m curious about your relationship with the objects in the study. How much did you save? Did documentation remove any need for a physical archive?

I was taking pictures of things because it interested me that this stuff has a peculiar hold on me. At one point, I thought I could photograph this stuff and then let it go. But that didn’t work. So I still have lot of stuff that was in father’s desk drawers and I have a lot of Plexiglas blocks that were used to support objects. 

All his scholarly materials, I found homes for in archives and collections. That was a big part of the job, shepherding that out. My siblings – I have four siblings – we divided the books that were left after the UBC archives and library took what they wanted. And then there were still books. 

It was a really long project to clear out this room. These layers would go, and it would be a different environment. And then another layer. So it really felt like an excavation. It was no problem for me to see his professional stuff go because I felt a weight, a responsibility, to preserve his work in some way that would be useful to other people. 

I hadn’t even been thinking about the magnifying glass, the cocktail menus from Lima, Peru, from 1956, the address book from the '40s – all these names I remember from when I was a child, colleagues of his. 

How do you hope people will respond to this work?

Like always, you hope that people find the work interesting and beautiful, that they want to spend time with it and it will resonate with them. That’s always my hope – that people will feel invited in and it will echo something in their own experience. And that people will feel invited to bring their own story to the work. I love it when people do that. ■

The Scholar’s Study is on view at the Republic Gallery in Vancouver from Sept. 5 to Oct. 6, 2019.

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