Camouflage

source: sevenpinesdesigns

Sabrina Gschwandtner’s work is absolutely amazing as well. Her artworks were presented in LED light boxes because it’s all constructed of 16mm film. She couples her own film with footage from the 1950s -1980s that were deaccessioned by the Fashion Institute of Technology. From a distance, you see thin strips of color that are joined together to form traditional quilt blocks. Gschwandtner sews the film together on her Bernina sewing machine, overlapping footage and using a zigzag stitch to hold them together. She considers the content of the films before splicing sections together, hoping to create a relationship not just of color, but of topic as well. Gschwandtner is noted as understanding, too, the connection between early film and women’s work. Per the museum’s literature, “women were among the first Hollywood film editors beause their conversance with sewing — and their smaller fingers — prepared them to cut, splice, and thread film.” There’s a little warp to Gschwandtner’s larger pieces and I think it adds to the impression of a flowing piece of fabric, disguising the actual nature of the material used.
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source: sabrinag

Sabrina Gschwandtner is a New York City based visual artist.
She has exhibited her work internationally, at institutions including the Smithsonian American Art Museum (2012), the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2011); Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (2010); Bucharest Biennale (2010); Gustavsbergs Konsthall, Sweden (2009); the Museum of Arts and Design, New York (2007); Contemporary Art Centre, Lithuania (2007); Socrates Sculpture Park, NY (2005), and SculptureCenter, NY (2004).
She has lectured at art schools, universities, and museums worldwide, including Harvard University; the Rhode Island School of Design; the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Smithsonian American Art Museum; Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London; Bergen National Academy of the Arts, Norway, and the Museum of World Culture, Sweden, among many others. She has done residencies at Wave Hill (2012), the International Artists Studio Program in Sweden (IASPIS, 2009), the Museum of Arts and Design (2009), and the MacDowell Colony (2007 and 2004). She received a BA with honors in art/semiotics from Brown University (2000) and an MFA from Bard College (2008). From 2002-7 she edited and published the ‘zine KnitKnit, which is now in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the New York Public Library, and the Fine Arts Library, Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University. Her book “KnitKnit: Profiles and Projects from Knitting’s New Wave” was released in 2007 and is distributed by Abrams.
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source: philartalliance

“Since 2009, I’ve been working from a collection of 16 mm films that were de-accessioned from the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) and given to me by Anthology Film Archives. These short films, dated 1950 to 1980, are educational documentaries about textiles as art, craft, fashion, decoration, vocation, military camouflage, feminist expression, and scientific metaphor. After watching the movies, I cut and sew them into configurations based on popular American quilt motifs. For my Sunshine and Shadow quilts, I dismantled the narratives of the historical films and re-interpreted their thematic concerns. In each work I intermingled footage to create a dialogue between the images inside the frames and the patterns that emerged from the overall quilt designs. I freely altered the footage by scratching it, painting over it, or bleaching it in the sun, and also used countdown leader, credits, and my own films. “Images of hands at work – spinning yarn, dyeing cloth, and feeding fabric into machines – are repeated throughout the show,” says Gschwandtner, “referencing not only my labor and similarly tactile experimental filmmaking methods, but also the historical connections between pioneering cinema and sewing. The sprocket mechanism of an early movie camera/projector was modeled after the newly popular sewing machine, and Hollywood’s first film editors were women who were hired for their agile sewing fingers.”

Sabrina Gschwandtner received a BA with honors in art/semiotics from Brown University (2000) and an MFA from Bard College (2008). She has exhibited her work internationally, at institutions including the Smithsonian American Art Museum (2012); Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2011); Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (2010); Bucharest Biennale (2010); Gustavsbergs Konsthall, Sweden (2009); the Museum of Arts and Design, New York (2007); Contemporary Art Centre, Lithuania (2007); Socrates Sculpture Park, NY (2005), and SculptureCenter, NY (2004). She has lectured at art schools, universities, and museums worldwide, including Harvard University; the Rhode Island School of Design; the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Smithsonian American Art Museum; Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London; Bergen National Academy of the Arts, Norway, and the Museum of World Culture, Sweden, among many others. She has done residencies at Wave Hill (2012), the International Artists Studio Program in Sweden (IASPIS, 2009), the Museum of Arts and Design (2009), and the MacDowell Colony (2007 and 2004). From 2002-7 she edited and published the ‘zine KnitKnit, which is now in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the New York Public Library, and the Fine Arts Library, Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University. Her book KnitKnit: Profiles and Projects from Knitting’s New Wave was released in 2007, and is distributed by Abrams. She is featured in the film “Handmade Nation” (2009) and has been interviewed on NPR and BBC Radio.
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source:

Sabrina Gschwandtner is a New York-based artist, curator and author, best known for leading a new wave of knitting activism. In her own work, Gschwandtner applies a range of photographic and textile mediums, including Super 8 film, digital video, 35 mm slides, sewing, crochet, knitting and embroidery. Her artwork has been exhibited at various international museums and galleries.

Her 2007 ‘Wartime Knitting Circle,’ shown left, at New York’s Museum of Arts and Design provided a space and materials for knitters to consider the role their handcraft could play in the Iraq war, while also serving as a public forum to interact with people of differing political opinions. This combination of creativity, activism and public dialogue are common in Gschwandtner’s work, providing inspiration and incentive to aspiring slow designers.

Gschwandtner is the founder of KnitKnit, a limited edition art journal, and her book “KnitKnit: Profiles and Projects from Knitting’s New Wave” was published in September 2007.