Moving Images: Sabrina Gschwandtner At Shoshana Wayne Gallery
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Loading... - Anneli Manurmi
- 14 Apr 2022
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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.
Among these pieces, Guy-Blaché Serpentine Dance Square (2021) is characteristically engrossing. Here, Gschwandtner has arranged lengths of footage from an 1897 film in concentric squares that buzz with black-white contrast and pop with staccato rhythm. The selected footage shows a woman on a dark stage performing an imitation of American actress Loie Fuller’s signature Serpentine dance. Manipulating her pale, voluminous costume with hidden rods, the dancer evokes a dynamically pulsing organism, a bud unfurling into blossom, a bird folding in and stretching out its fluttering wings. The larger quilt using this same footage measures 72 by 48 inches and joins six such reverberating squares in a grid that verges on Op Art dazzle. Hanging freely over the lightbox, the fabric-like surface buckles slightly, its seams imposing frequent breaks in the continuity of the imagery, in the manner of rough edits.
Throughout this show, Gschwandtner engages in her own shape-shifting, time-bending dance. She breaks film down into its constituent parts—still, discrete, stop-motion photographs—and transforms the usual temporal flow of its narrative into energized fields of now now now. She foregrounds the medium’s original material properties, its aesthetic potential as a surface to be looked at and not just through. A spirit of reclamation prevails. Read More...
