Language

Sarah Cwynar (Vancouver, Canada, 1985) in The Colour Factory, takes us inside a cosmetics company and into the mechanisms of commercial color production to open a broader reflection “on the standards of colour, beauty and capitalism, as models imposed in the experience of human life”, as the artist states. There is someone who makes decisions; standards are set by a company, an economic group, an authority. A field that continues to be strongly determined by the way men look at women.
In the film and the photographic works of Colour Factory, Cwynar uses a series of artifacts to dissect the deeply ingrained systems that unconsciously guide our behaviors as consumers of images and goods. The oversized colour grid on which Tracy is posed—rendered with extra intensity and saturation—subtly burlesques the effort to evaluate “correct” skin tones.
(taken from Lesley Martin’s essay)