FILM QUILTS Sabrina Gschwandtner - Artist Wednesday!

My quilts utilize film footage from early Feminist documentaries. I retain allusions to the materials' former narratives while reworking them with my own personal footage to place them in a contemporary framework.

The source of the historical footage is the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), which recently de-accessioned the 16 mm films in their library. These short, educational documentaries, dated 1952 - 1982, focused on textile crafts such as crocheting, knitting, sewing, fabric dyeing, and quilting, and celebrated the women who made them.

After watching the movies many times, I cut them up and sew them together with my own, personal film footage. In processes that reference both painting and experimental filmmaking, I bleach, dye, scratch, and paint onto some of my film.

The formal logic of my sewn designs are derived from popular American quilt motifs including log cabin squares, octagonal stars, and "string quilts," wherein long, thin fabric scraps left over from other projects are cut and sewn together. The works are hung like curtains in the windows of exhibition spaces, or displayed on gallery walls via light boxes.

Quilts in Women’s Lives, 2009.
16 mm film, polyamide thread, cotton thread,
48 x 72 inches

http://sabrinag.com/index.php

Jane Lackey

Jane Lackey - Artist Statement

Commonplaces 4, 2009
cloth with paint and ink

Mutations, slips of speech, genetics and language intermix and fuel my questions about identity, communication, sameness and difference. The many human traits we hold in common, expressed succinctly in the paired down make-up of our DNA, produce mesmerizing variation and difference. Mistakes and blips multiply within our systems and perpetuate intensities, blurs and unexpected masses of consequence. Through this we know ourselves. 

My installations, objects, drawings and paintings abstractly refer to specific places or clusters of people--designated gene pools momentarily united or dispersed. To map these connections, I activate materials such as the translucent skin-like surface of paper, the subtle raised patterns of silk brocade or the direct impressions of my fingerprints or thread in paint. Dots and nodes of action and passivity form fields and systems of circuitry. Branching lines fill and traverse space suggesting floor plans, maps, genetic diagrams, pathways or tangled conversations forming a labyrinth both private and contemplative. As my works grow from small parts into clusters, sequenced groupings, folded maps or architectural insertions, intimate qualities are expanded into a space of walking, observing and tactile experience. Fleeting connections known and obsessed within our bodies, fragments of language and synaptic impulses of memory mingle as still surface erupts. Accumulated drops and coats of paint mass, layer and hide something vulnerable and private under the camouflage of surface. A skin is formed. Materials fold—layer---bend until surface is history. 

Anne Wilson

My work evolves in a conceptual space where social and political ideas encounter the material processes of handwork and industry, where the organization of fields and the objects they help generate is constantly subverted by the swarming, anarchic energy of the objects themselves. Extrapolating from personal subjective rituals to observations of larger systems within the built environment, I investigate the micro- and macrocosms of networks and matrices through weave, stitch, crochet, knot, net, animation, and sound. Using pixilation and projection, I de-materialize and re-animate work that began on the border between drawing and object making, and remains liminal in whatever new medium it enters. My source materials - hair, linen, lace, pins, wire, glass, and thread - are the props of both domestic culture and larger social systems. I join together the points where these systems overlap, and where issues of sexuality and decorum, vitality and death construct meaningful relationships, and find release.

~ Anne Wilson

How about that artist's statement?

This one is for Ms. Wilson. . .

Leslie Dill Rise, 2007
laminated fabric, hand-dyed cotton, paper, metal, silk organza
Stiff fabric - kinda what you are thinking of? Granted, makes you wonder what she is using to "laminate". For the rest of you who may be browsing this post, this artist is fabulous. Check out this site to see more of her work.
http://www.georgeadamsgallery.com/artists/artist_ins.php3?artist=10

For the Fibers I Class

Here are some examples of successful quilts using the word boundaries as a conceptual starting point.

The students' work deal with distinctly different ideas, however they all began with the same assignment; interpreting the word boundaries in a unique way using the techniques of shibori, thickened dye, and quilting. The artists above are, in order; Xena Holzapfel, Sarah Lampke, Lindsay Wilson, John Aborn, Ji Kim, and Heather Clancy. There are examples of abstract as well as narrative works above.

What do I ponder before I start to make something. . .

So I was asked this the other day and thought I might as well put it here.

1. Is it relevant?
Will anyone care if I make this thing? Generally it is going to take a lot of time and effort on my part - will anyone actually give a shit if I bother? This has a lot to do with what is going on in our society at the moment. A lot of people don't care about something that happened a long time ago unless you can relate it to something that is happening to them today. I hate to say it but most people jus do not know their history.

2. Can I do anything exciting with the materials that I am thinking of using?
In fiber we tend to get a bad reputation as being ultra-crafty makers of crap. I am not against craft. I feel there is amazing craft out there and create it myself (designing sweaters and such) however, when it is art we need to go a bit further. I like to do this with using non-traditional materials a lot of the time. When I do use traditional materials I like to use them in ways that make them appear in a contemporary manner. This is just me - some of my fav artists are working completely using traditional material and technique.

3. Conceptually what kind of reaction am I looking for from my viewer?
I don't want to make something that someone is going to ho-hum and then walk away from. Even if it makes someone angry (as some of my grad school work did) at least it is creating a response.

4. If they don't immediately get my concept - as some don't with my more formal abstracted work - is it at least aesthetically pleasing enough to hold the viewer's attention and make them go read my artist's statement?
Tons of silly little sketches and at least one prototype when it is an installation. If it doesn't look good to me, despite how much effort I may have into it, I don't show it. This is depressing when you have spent a ton of time on something but is better then having a horrid critique of work that you don't feel strongly about yourself!

5. Research!
I really don't want to reinvent the wheel. I may think I have the most unique idea in the universe - until I see someone else has beat me to it. In which case why should I go there. People will work with the same concepts as you - you just need to put your own unique spin on it. You never want to see something that looks like your work in a magazine. It will just be assumed that you copied it from the magazine because you can't come up with your own idea. And you know what they say about assume. . .

                                           But I have three dogs! Mixed Media, 2011

Magdalena

When I was an undergrad this artist inspired me to want to work large scale. She started out working primarily with fiber then moved on to casting with bronze etc. Browse her site if you like. . .
http://www.abakanowicz.art.pl/