Kitsch Encyclopedia is a book project by Sara Cwynar of original and appropriated images and text, published with Blonde Art Books.

Kitsch Encyclopedia is a book project that brings together writings by Milan Kundera, Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard, as well as my own writing to formulate a relationship of kitsch to images. Kundera considers kitsch to be a categorizing phenomenon: a means through which complex human experience is distilled to simple, sentimental motifs. All three writers discuss a similar circumstance of the contemporary image world: the way that our culture of images, especially in the age of the internet, provides an Idealized, kitsch-based image world that exists on top of the real world and in many ways has subsumed it. - Sara Cwynar 

Kitsch Encyclopedia, 2014, is full-color hardcover, 189 pages, and printed in an edition of 1000. $35.00. Available here.

Sara Cwynar (b. 1985, Vancouver) lives and works in New York, NY. Cwynar currently has a solo exhibition at Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery, Philadelphia and her first solo exhibition with Foxy Productions, New York, opens on April 4, 2014. Other recent solo exhibitions include The Foam Photography Museum, Amsterdam, and Cooper Cole Gallery, Toronto.  Her work has been exhibited at Higher Pictures, New York; The Camera Club of New York, New York; Ed Varie, New York; The New York Art Book Fair at PS1 MoMA; and Printed Matter, New York. 

BLONDE ART BOOKS Established by Sonel Breslav in 2012, Blonde Art Books is a Brooklyn based organization dedicated to promoting self-published art books through exhibitions, publications, book fairs, talks, and online exposure. Kitsch Encyclopedia by Sara Cwynar is Blonde Art Books’ first publication.