Sabrina Gschwandtner

Instagram: @filmquilts

Website: http://www.Sabrinag.com

Bio: Sabrina Gschwandtner's hybrid work in film, video, photography, textiles and installation has been included in exhibitions worldwide including “Crafting America,” Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; “40 Under 40,” Smithsonian American Art Museum; “Power of Making,” Victoria and Albert Museum; the 4th Bucharest Biennale in Romania; “Fabric of a Nation: American Quilt Stories," MFA Boston; “alt_quilts," American Folk Art Museum, and “Luminous Flux 2.0: new + historic works from the digital art frontier,” Thoma Foundation Art House, NM, among others. She recently received a three channel video commission from LACMA, a billboard video commission from the City of West Hollywood, a 2020 Money for Women/Deming Award, and a 2019 City of Los Angeles (COLA) Individual Artist Fellowship. She has been awarded residencies at the International Artists Studio Program in Sweden, the Museum of Arts and Design, and MacDowell. Her work is in the permanent collections of LACMA; Walker Art Center; the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the Getty Research Institute; the RISD Museum; the Toledo Museum, the Mint Museum; the Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art; the International Quilt Museum, and the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation, among other public collections.

Statement: I work with quilting, a medium passed down by my maternal ancestors, from whom I learned how to create art from carefully saved scraps. I use undervalued and overlooked films as fabric and sew them together into new narratives. My sewing is a mending of history that foregrounds disregarded stories and spotlights hidden labor. I connect areas of cultural production that have institutionally been kept divided - art, film, and handcraft - in order to claim space for myself and others who have been left out of dominant narratives. My B&W, 35 mm film quilt and photography series utilizes film footage created by women cinema pioneers whose work from the late 1800s - early 1900s is woefully under-recognized. I re-print footage from their films, sourced from archives around the world, onto black and white 35 mm film stock, and then cut and sew the footage into configurations based on quilt motifs that are shown backlit by LED panels.