View of "Scarce Material," 2022, at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, showing Guy-Blache Serpentine Dance Square, 2021, and Cinema Sanctuary Study 2: Alice Guy- Blache’s 1897 Serpentine Dance By Mrs. Bob Walter, 2019.
April 13, 2022
By Leah Ollman
Sabrina Gschwandtner’s latest show at Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Los Angeles, “Scarce Material,” performs an act of historical remediation, recovering the names and works of under-recognized women filmmakers of the silent era. Her “quilts” spliced and stitched together from fragments of footage taken from those artists’ century-old works attest to the long-standing suppression of women’s voices. They do so as vivid objects in their own right, with tremendous visual kick and formal integrity, from their minute details to their arresting overall patterns.
The Los Angeles–based artist revitalizes works from French director Alice Guy-Blaché, considered the world’s first female filmmaker; Marion E. Wong, founder of the groundbreaking Chinese-American Mandarin Film Company; Germaine Dulac, whose 1928 Surrealist film predates the better-known work of Luis Buñuel; and the pioneering silhouette animator Lotte Reiniger. Gschwandtner sourced footage from international archives and made prints from their digital files on 35mm black-and-white film stock. Cut and sewn into traditional quilt patterns, the strips of film come to read as line and tone, even brushstroke and woven thread. Secondary matter, such as the numbers on countdown leaders and miscellaneous words of identification on the films, appear sporadically, oriented in all directions—a kind of charged, concrete poetry. Encompassing work made since 2019, the show presents five small quilts, each roughly one-foot square, as well as four larger quilts, some of which extrapolate geometrically from the smaller modules, mounted on lightboxes. Also on view are a video and related prints, some of them reproducing explanatory notes about the subjects and images.
