Sabrina Gschwandtner: Absinthe, Smoke, Sugar, Choice

Shoshana Wayne Gallery is pleased to present Absinthe, Smoke, Sugar, Choice, an exhibition by Sabrina Gschwandtner. This is the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view from November 1, 2025 through January 10th, 2026, with an opening reception on November 1, from 4-6pm.

After the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Gschwandtner looked back to the “pre-Roe” era, drawing on early film and familial memory to explore how women have taken control of their bodies and lives.

Working with black-and-white 35mm film, etching ink on film, thread, and video, she presents twelve film quilts and a single-channel video that expand the concept of “filmic suture” into a three-dimensional, materially embodied cinematic form.

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Through her research-based and materially grounded practice, the artist stitches together a lineage of bodily autonomy and resistance. Two early films directed by women anchor the exhibition. The first, Alice Guy-Blaché’s 1906 film Madame’s Cravings, portrays a pregnant protagonist who gleefully disrupts social norms — stealing absinthe, tobacco, and candy while her partner tends to their child. Her untamed desires and public act of childbirth, captured more than a century ago, subvert prescribed ideals of maternal propriety and bodily control. Gschwandtner heightens this subversion by hand-painting passages of the film — green for absinthe, and yellow, red, and blue for the lollipop — transforming the protagonist’s cravings into vivid, material expressions of desire and agency.

The second film, a 1931 documentary by Marvin Breckinridge, chronicles the Frontier Nursing Service, which delivered maternal care by horseback in rural Appalachia and dramatically reduced maternal and infant mortality rates. Together, these films challenge the omission of reproductive life on screen. After the implementation of the 1934 Hays Code, depictions of pregnancy and childbirth disappeared from American cinema for decades. By revisiting works made before this period, Gschwandtner recovers a visual history that resists the cultural erasure of reproductive experience.

This exhibition also debuts a new “video quilt,” a hybrid form the artist has developed over the last eight years. Resembling a patchwork quilt, the work interlaces archival film, handwritten text, and a recorded interview with the artist’s mother, who recounts obtaining an illegal abortion in the years before Roe v. Wade. The video models forms of agency, showing women asserting control over their bodies and narratives, even under restrictive and oppressive conditions.

Gschwandtner has exhibited internationally, at 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 8-channel video Later in Life, commissioned by the Skirball Cultural Center, is currently on view at the museum. Her work is held in the permanent collections of LACMA, the Walker Art Center, 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. She earned her BA from Brown University and her MFA from Bard.