CAROL SAWYER
Grimm Future, 2025
4K video
14 minutes, 37 seconds
Carol Sawyer’s artistic practice includes photography, installation, video, and improvised music. Playing with the line between fact and fiction, her artwork often addresses memory and the construction of history.
Grimm Future is her newest video installation comprised of three projected video tableaux vivant: The Alchemists, Omnia Vincit Amor, and Rapunzel. Tableaux vivant, or “living pictures,” was a genre of entertainment that was popular between 1830 and 1920 in which a cast of characters represented scenes from literature, art, history, or everyday life on a stage. In Grimm Future, the videos employ no camera movement – each is a fixed shot, reminiscent of a painting. With a nod to the enduringly popular historical Grimm’s fairytales, Sawyer draws on early 20th century illustrations of European fairy tales along with 15th century Netherlandish “primitive” paintings to create her rich colour palette and dramatic scenes, merging historical reference with apocalyptic imaginings. As the story and driving soundtrack unfold, so does a catastrophic and foreboding future of forest fires, floods, and traffic jams, concluding with a final image obscured by smoke.
This three-channel immersive experience embodies a tension between seduction and ruin; it is a poetic response to recent and current events, including pandemic isolation, war, climate anxiety, increasing political polarization, the emergence of AI and algorithms that filter what news we receive, as well as the proliferation of fake news. Sawyer’s project embraces the instability of the current moment, with her constructed images foregrounding the “fakeness” of images to speak honestly about fragmentation, competing realities, and the precariousness of knowledge itself. This visual strategy serves as an analogy for the ways in which we piece together our understanding of what is going on in the world from different sources of information.
As we enter what some would consider a new dark age, Sawyer draws her inspiration from the visual inventions of previous dark ages. All three Grimm Future videos are composited from multiple layers of still images and video that were shot separately and presented in a way that disrupts a conventional camera perspective, thereby visually referencing the types of spatial organization employed in Medieval art. Medieval artists worked at a threshold moment, when plague, war, and upheaval shaped a visual language dense with symbolism, compression, and moral urgency. Their work offers Sawyer a model for representing dissonance, wonder, and collapse—qualities that resonate with our own age of ecological and social unraveling.
Music and voice are integral to Sawyer’s practice. Drawing on Sawyer’s background in classical vocal performance and a long involvement in improvised music, the soundtrack of her own voice establishes her presence and embodiment within the narrative of the videos. This moving soundtrack offers beauty within the grim future that the narrative predicts, pointing to cycles of desire and destruction that have shaped human history.
Credits: The Alchemists
Director: Carol Sawyer
Actor: Elliott Ramsay
Hair and Make-up: Hallah Donovan
Wardrobe stylist: Jenny Brohin
Camera: Amo Yue Wang
Sound Design: Stefan Smulovitz
Coeditors/ compositing: Pegah Tabassinejad and Carol Sawyer
Credits: Omnia Vincit Amor
Director/ Camera: Carol Sawyer
Actor: Amo Yue Wang
Costume/ stylist: Carol Sawyer
Sound Design: Stefan Smulovitz
Coeditors/ compositing: Pegah Tabassinejad and Carol Sawyer
Credits: Rapunzel
Rapunzel was shot in November 2023 in Studio A in the Boca Centre for Film and Animation at Capilano College, with the support of an expert team of Capilano University faculty and students, led by DOP Suzanne Pierce. The film department of Capilano College generously supported this production with the loan of their green screen studio and pro camera, sound and lighting gear.
Rapunzel features James Meger and Carol Sawyer improvising on the jazz standard ‘Ill Wind’, which drives the soundtrack for the entire installation. (Ill Wind was written by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler). The centre of the image offers a glimpse into a far landscape of forest fires, floods, and traffic jams, before the image is obscured by smoke.
CREDITS:
Performers: James Meger, Carol Sawyer
DOP: Suzanne Pierce
Gaffer / Key Grip: Earl Kjargaard
Camera: Randy Peterson
Sound Recorder: Lisa Kolisnyk
Assistant to the Director: Amo Yue Wang
CAP Student Crew: Justin Cahyadi, Robin Krysl, Mohammed Zaman Khan, Jacob Brundrett, Eli Lava, Mia Jenieca Teodocia, Morgan Ayelet, Christian Zakharchuk, Alannah Vasquez, Miguel Angel Burgos Baragan
Stylist: Sabrina Ko
Hair & Makeup: Vivian Vera Chen
VFX/ animation: Kerr Holden
Sound Design: Stefan Smulovitz
Music mixing: Sheldon Zaharko
Editor: Lucas Isidoro de Silva
Catering and transport: Michael O’Connell
The artist is very grateful that this production of Rapunzel was funded by a grant from the Visual Arts section of the BC Arts Council.
Artist Biography
Carol Sawyer is a visual artist and singer working with photography, installation, video, and improvised music. Since the early 1990’s her artwork has investigated the connections between photography and fiction, performance, memory, and history. Her ongoing and expansive project, The Natalie Brettschneider Archive, was most recently exhibited at the Calgary Contemporary in Calgary, Alberta in 2023. A book about this project, titled Carol Sawyer: The Natalie Brettschneider Archive, was published in 2020 by the Carleton University Art Gallery, in conjunction with the Vancouver Art Gallery, The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, and the Koffler Art Gallery in Toronto. In 2022, she collaborated on the project Listening to Pictures: Artists on the SFU Art Collection, which was curated by Kimberly Phillips and exhibited at Simon Fraser University (SFU) Galleries in Vancouver. In 2017, The Canada Council awarded Sawyer the Duke and Duchess of York Prize in Photography. In 2021, she was nominated for the prestigious Scotiabank Photography Award.
Sawyer earned an Honours diploma in photography from ECUAD, and a Masters in Interdisciplinary Arts from SFU, where she studied acting, music performance, critical theory, and music composition. Sawyer studied classical singing, focusing on opera and art song, before training in extended voice with Richard Armstrong. She has performed extensively in improvised music contexts and incorporates her singing voice into her artworks in performances and videos. Sawyer has released three CDs with her improvising ensemble ion Zooand collaborated and recorded with American composer and trombonist Michael Vlatkovich. A Natalie Brett Quartet LP was launched with concerts in December 2022, at 8 east in Vancouver, and in January 2023 at the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Grimm Future: The Alchemists, 2025
video still, 4K video
14 minutes, 37 seconds
photo courtesy of the artist