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THIS WEEK ART maltatoday | SUNDAY • 1 SEPTEMBER 2019 4 Canadian artist Sara Cwynar speaks to TEODOR RELJIC about her ongoing exhibition at Blitz in Valletta, The Good Life, which turns a critical eye on ingrained notions about what constitutes and drives our contemporary conception of happiness Teodor Reljic The dubious pursuit of happiness How does your former experience and work inform 'The Good Life'? I have a background as a graphic designer, working for magazines including the New York Times Magazine. I spent a lot of time there thinking about what kind of fantasies these big cultural products are selling, how im- ages get re-interpreted and morphed and used once they enter the world, how they fit into our fantasies or pre- conceptions, and how we use them to imagine that we are working toward something, to maintain a sort of fantasy that makes working under capitalism worth it. In my own experience working cra- zy New York advertising and design jobs I began to really question these ideals, and the sort of life that is promised to us if we just work hard enough, which is a life that doesn't actually manifest for a lot of people in the way it's promised. I also learned first- hand how these aspirational ideals are communicated to us through images. The title of the exhibition is certainly loaded and open to multiple interpretations. But perhaps most urgent and interesting would be the topical dimension of it; the idea that 'this is how we live now' or at least, 'this is the way we aspire to live now'. How do you think your work grapples with this consideration, and are there any conclusions you can come to after you've explored this? I was trying to get at what constitutes the idea of a good life, particularly in an Ameri- can context (where I live). And as I mentioned before, how images and popular cul- ture contribute to an ideal of what a good life is, that is in many ways unattainable for most. But as one of my fa- vorite theorists, Lauren Ber- lant, points out in her book, Cruel Optimism, the idea of the good life is generative, it keeps us thrown into the world, it provides a source of desire and something to work towards or look for- ward to, so we need it, even if it holds us back and exhausts us, overworks us, wears us down. She is speaking spe- cifically about the way that people work and work under capitalism toward something that may not really be within reach. In my own work, I am try- ing to engage with this in sev- eral ways, for example, in my film Rose Gold, I think about how the rose gold iPhone is really just the same thing we already own but in a different colour, and how it gets sold to us as something new, and we often like this shift be- cause we need to keep want- ing things and it feels good to keep wanting things, but it also holds us back because it means working and work- ing to acquire objects that don't necessarily have the transformative potential they promise. The film is about desire in many forms, for people and for objects, and about the way we aspire to a good life through objects and "I spent a lot of time there thinking about what kind of fantasies these big cultural products are selling, and how we use them to imagine that we are working toward something, to maintain a sort of fantasy that makes working under capitalism worth it" Sara Cwynar • Photo by Aubrey Mayer