"The Sum of the Parts”
Los Angeles, CA
May 29 - September 11, 2022
The five artists in The Sum of the Parts explore the physical and conceptual dimensionality inherent in quilting. They investigate core aspects of quilting including abstraction, pattern making, and how memories are embedded in materials, while expanding upon the form itself by pushing beyond its conventional structure using unexpected materials and sculptural techniques.
“Women’s Work”
635 South Broadway
Tarrytown, NY 10591
May 26, 2022 - September 26, 2022
This groundbreaking exhibition tracks the deep, pervasive, and continuing influence of the historic female domestic craft tradition in the practice of contemporary women artists and invites new investigations into the position of women in the contemporary art world.
March 12 - April 16, 2022
Opening reception: March 12, 2-5pm
“Scarce Material”
5247 W. Adams Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90016
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Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Scarce Material by Sabrina Gschwandtner. This is the Los Angeles based artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view from March 12 through April 16, 2022, with an opening reception on March 12 from 2-5pm.
For this exhibition, the artist looks back to the earliest iterations of the cinematic form, during the Silent Film era. Using black and white 35 mm film, video, silver gelatin photography, and fabric, Gschwandtner offers an alternative to the male-dominated history of film, and a literal mending and repairing of film history. “Scarce Material” refers both to a quilting term for anything that can be stitched together into a quilt, and to the archived early cinema made by pioneering women filmmakers that is in short supply.
The artist worked with local and international film archives over three years to source digital copies of some of the earliest films made by women cinema pioneers, whose work from the late 1800s - early 1900s is woefully under-recognized. She prints these movies onto black and white 35 mm film stock, and then cuts and sews the film into configurations based on quilt motifs. She intermingles footage to create a dialogue between the images inside the frames and the overall patterns of the quilt designs. The artist’s sewing of film is a three-dimensional form of cinematic editing and a reconfiguration of the notion of "filmic suture" (the use of editing to draw audiences into a story). It is also a way to center marginalized material histories of cinema, in which women with sewing skills translated their handcraft to film editing, and certain early film technology was based on the mechanical advancements of the sewing machine.
Many movies made by pioneering female filmmakers were never archived, and have been lost to history. To honor these works, the artist hand-embroiders filmmaker’s names and hand-writes the titles of their films and the dates the films were made onto blank film. Gschwandtner’s silver gelatin photos and video evoke cinema’s earliest origins in stop motion photography through a translation of moving images into patterns of women’s self-portraiture.
Gschwandtner has exhibited internationally at museums including the Victoria & Albert Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, among many others. Her 3 channel video “Screen Credit,” commissioned by LACMA, is currently on view at the museum’s Stark Bar. Her work is held in the permanent collections of LACMA, the Smithsonian American Art Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the RISD Museum, and the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation, among other public and private collections worldwide. Her ‘zine KnitKnit is included in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the New York Public Library, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Fine Arts Library at Harvard University. She received a BA from Brown University and an MFA from Bard College.
The artist wishes to thank: EYE Filmmuseum, the Netherlands; Gaumont-Pathé Archives; British Film Archives; Kino Lorber; Academy Film Archives; Women Film Pioneers Project; Gregory Yee Mark; Suzan Mischer; Aimee Mann, and Maia Julis.
An online exhibition featuring:
Shiva Ahmadi, Nancy Baker Cahill, Tom Burckhardt, Max Colby, Russell Crotty, Nicole Eisenman, Sabrina Gschwandtner, Mike Kelley, Ed Kienholz, Joshua Marsh, linn meyers, Yoko Ono, Raymond Pettibon, Harry Roseman, Jim Shaw, Kiki Smith and Yuken Teruya.
September 21 - November 30, 2021
Honored to be a finalist for the Museum of Arts and Design’s 2021 Burke Prize, a contemporary art award of $50,000 given to a U.S.-based artist who is age 45 or under and works in the expansive fields of glass, fiber, clay, metal, or wood. The online exhibition runs from September 17, 2021 - March 20, 2022.
October 10, 2021 - January 17, 2022
Quilts and coverlets have a unique capacity to tell stories: their tactile, intricate mode of creation and their traditional use in the home impart deeply personal narratives of their creators, and the many histories they express reveal a complex record of America. Quilts have also been used in North America since the 17th century, and their story, told by many voices, has evolved alongside the United States.
Upending expectations about quilt displays—traditionally organized by region, form, or motif—“Fabric of a Nation: American Quilt Stories” is a loosely chronological presentation in seven thematic sections that voices multiple perspectives. Visitors see and hear from artists, educators, academics, and activists, and the remarkable examples on view are by an underrecognized diversity of artistic hands and minds from the 17th century to today, including female and male, known and unidentified, urban and rural makers; immigrants; and Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, and LGBTQIA+ Americans. The exhibition invites visitors to celebrate the artistry and intricacy of quilts and coverlets and the lives they document, while also considering the complicated legacies ingrained in the fabric of American life.
The exhibition brings together the only two surviving quilts by artist Harriet Powers, displaying the MFA’s iconic Pictorial quilt (1895–98) alongside the Bible quilt (1885–86), on loan from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, for the first time. Powers, who was born into slavery in Athens, Georgia, was an exceptional artist and storyteller. Together, the masterpieces in this exhibition tell inclusive, human stories that link us across time and articulate a rich, and richly complicated, story of our shared history.
June 15 - August 28, 2021
Shoshana Wayne Gallery has a long history of showing artists using woven practices. Most artists in the show previously have exhibited or continue to exhibit with the gallery: these artists are Gil Yefman, Dinh Q. Lê, Sabrina Gschwandtner, Elaine Reichek, Frances Trombly, Anina Major, Jeffrey Gibson, Terri Friedman, and James Richards. In addition, Madame Moreau, Max Colby, and Yveline Tropéa are all showing their work in our Los Angeles gallery for the first time.
This is not a textile art exhibition. Much of the artwork has less to do with conventional ideas of weaving or an affinity for textile art as such and more to do with a sense of craftsmanship and process in art making. Major for instance works in clay, her process inspired by Bahamian basking weaving techniques. African beads and beading similarly underscore the work of both Moreau and Tropéa, while Gibson takes inspiration from Native American beading.
It is curious to observe that much of what you might call the ‘assembly language’ of each of the works tends to follow a basic pattern, the design made of successive foldings above or below a line. This harkens back to early human craft practices and even resembles in some respects the systemic architecture of initial, low-level computer programming languages. Machines, it would seem, were first taught to learn and perform basic tasks in ways which mimicked creative human thoughts patterns.
Making is the key here, with individual pieces carefully, sometimes painstakingly arranged, stitched, woven, handcrafted or embellished through loving labor. Several of the artworks were produced over a few months, sometimes in the studio or via social collaboration as in the case of Gil Yefman who worked with the Kuchinate, an African Women’s collective in Israel on the initial wet felting for his artworks, created originally for his exhibition “Kibbutz Buchenwald” at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.
Form, scale and color are the considerations of utmost importance for all these artists, as much as materials and process in the works. Gschwandtner, Richards, Lê, Trombly, and even Friedman embrace abstraction to some extent: weaving or related techniques are used to obscure or to abstract raw, even sometimes graphic social and political visual source material ranging from posters and film stills to text, rope and printed bolts of fabric.
Colby and Reichek are conceptual artists who consciously work in decorative art styles with prosaic, malleable materials. Their artwork is intended to evoke an immediate association with domesticity, gendered labor, or women’s work specifically, and is therefore political in its orientation, if not intention, as a statement of social and cultural identity and gender (and ongoing fluidity) in contemporary culture.
The identity of the artist is a latent subject in a good deal of the artwork in this show, making many of the works autobiographical as in the case, most visibly, of Gibson, Lê, Colby, Major, Moreau, and Tropéa. To engage with their artwork is to enter their minds, to see a world anew through their eyes. Working above and below the line becomes a formal vehicle for a process of subjective storytelling, a way of ordering information to make sense of who they are, why and where they belong.
June 18 - July 17, 2021
The two artists brought together in this show, Michelle Grabner and Sabrina Gschwandtner, explore handcraft techniques as essential foundations of their artistic practice—Michelle in her paintings and sculptures, and Sabrina in her work as a media artist in film, photography and video. Both consider the activities of craft-- its communal social structure and labor-- crucial visually, politically, and theoretically as both process and content. The rich history of women’s work in craft drew both artists to adopting it into their visual art. Though their means are distinct, Grabner’s monochromatic paintings and Gschwandtner’s film quilts, sewn and woven postcards, hand-colored photographs and video build on the handwork and repetitive structure of weaving, threading and collage to build rhythmic patterns of similarity and difference throughout. In Grabner’s new paintings, small hand gestures and controlled touch determine the painterly outcome of her subtle monochromatic canvases. In her film quilts, Gschwandtner sews thirty-five-millimeter film strips of a dancer performing the Loie Fuller Serpentine Dance into mesmerizing compositions. Both artists have sustained a long exploration of these craft techniques, which they developed into distinctive voices in their respective art work.
In describing the context for her recent paintings, Grabner invokes the tale of Penelope waiting for Odysseus’ return. She marks time passing while weaving at her loom, only to unravel the day’s work each night. So Grabner picks apart the warp or weft of a selected fabric for the paintings, which are based on the de-weaving of a primary textile-- either soft thermal hospital blankets or burlap. When overlaid on the prepared linen surface, these deconstructed textiles establish a guided imprint for the painter’s work. She paints in the negative spaces, building up layers into idiosyncratic surfaces that run between “braille paintings” to brushy skeins of translucent paint.
A dominant interest in Grabner’s career as an abstract artist has been the creating and dismantling of gingham fabric patterns-- in oil paintings, woven paper floor works, brass and iron sculptures and prints. Here, she eschews the bold graphics of the earlier work in favor of the challenge of a monochromatic series. Operating within the stricture of a shallow depth of field amplifies small gestures and the meditative spirit of its making. By moving away from bold graphics, the artist forces attention upon the specificities of the surface, the hand and the quiet presence of women’s making, so central to her artistic identity.
Sabrina Gschwandtner presents a collection of work from her Cinema Sanctuary Series, in which she has reprinted film footage from under-recognized female filmmakers, sewing film strips from archival footage into elaborate quilts, videos and photographic works. For Gschwandtner, historical material culture is her expansive medium, retelling stories of female pioneers on both sides of the camera. Since 2009, the artist has been sewing film strips, interpreting historical quilt patterns in celluloid and thread. “By tying together my handwork with the film work of the women of early cinema, I mend a rupture in film history.”
The current installation expands upon her film quilt works by focusing on a single cinema piece, Loie Fuller’s Serpentine Dance as filmed by Alice Guy-Blaché and performed by Mrs. Bob Walter in 1897. This captures a solo performance in film stills, akin to the stop motion photographic sequences of figures in motion popularized by Eadweard Muybridge in the 1880s. Gschwandtner’s female subjects were pioneers in time-based media, including film, dance and performance. Fuller invented her dance in a billowing white gown, upon which she projected gel-colored lights to create undulating rainbow atmospheric effects. In addition to an original film quilt, the presentation includes hand-colored gelatin silver photographic prints, a hand-painted video piece using the early film, and a collection of hand sewn postcards from the artist to Abattoir mailed over the last eight months.
Sabrina Gschwandtner received her BA from Brown University and her MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College. Her work has been included in numerous worldwide museum exhibitions including most recently at the Toledo Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. In 2020 she installed a three-channel video commission work at the Los Angeles County Museum (LACMA). She was the founder of the influential magazine KnitKnit. She is represented by Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Los Angeles, where she will show later this year. She resides in Los Angeles.
Michelle Grabner is the Crown Professor of Painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow. Curator, critic and teacher, Grabner also runs experimental non-profit galleries the Suburban and the Poor Farm with artist Brad Killim. In 2014, she was a curator of the Whitney Biennial, and in 2018 the Artistic Director for the first FRONT International triennial in Cleveland. This summer she is co-curator of Sculpture Milwaukee. A mid-career survey, I Work From Home, appeared at moCa Cleveland in 2014. She has exhibited extensively worldwide and is represented by James Cohan Gallery, New York. She resides in Milwaukee.