Wednesday, January 15, 2019, 7pm
$7 General, $5 Members, free for ArtsAccess pass holders

Squeaky Wheel presents an evening of two films that investigate how women have asserted and gained political and social agency through textiles. Featuring Sabrina Gschwandtner’s no idle hands (2008) and Pat Ferrero’s Hearts and Hands (1988), this screening coincides with the exhibition of Gschwandtner’s two works on view in the gallery: Hands at Work (for Pat Ferrero) and Hands at Work (for Pat Ferrero) II, both of which were made with 16mm film prints of films by Pat Ferrero. Sabrina Gschwandtner will be present via Skype to introduce the screening.

Gschwandtner’s no idle hands, shot of the string-like material of Super 8mm, is a traveloge film taking viewers on a symbolic journey of the history of knitting. As the artist states, the title no idle hands, “historically referred to women pitching in to help the war movement; to the act of keeping busy to avoid unease or unrest, and to the actions of those who want to stimulate change. This film evokes the latter meaning, as it depicts women placing textiles within feminist, queer, and collaborative art contexts.” The film is followed by Pat Ferrero’s 1988 documentary Hearts and Hands, which chronicles the lives and quilt making practices of ordinary women as well as individuals such as Harriet Tubman, Elizabeth Keckley, Frances Willard and Abigail Scott Duniway through the 19th century. Made over a period of ten years, and with unprecedented access to historic quilts in both private and public collections, Ferrero’s film traces the role of quilts in forming communities that speak to abolition, patriotism, social justice and settler-colonialism.

Program
Sabrina Gschwandtner, no idle hands, 9:43min, Super 8 film transferred to video, sound, 2008
Pat Ferrero, Hearts and Hands, 60min,16mm film transferred to video, 1988

Pat Ferrero is an independent filmmaker whose work as a producer/director includes Hopi: Songs of the Fourth World, Hearts & Hands and Quilts in Women’s Lives. These films have won numerous awards, been screened nationally on cable and PBS, and have been exhibited at national festivals including Sundance, New York Film Festival, National Educational Film and Video Festival, the Hawaii and San Francisco Internl Film Festivals, as well as international festivals in Asia, Latin America, and Europe.

Sabrina Gschwandtner’s artwork has been exhibited in the United States as well as internationally at institutions including the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC; the Museum of Arts and Design in New York; and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Her work has been featured and reviewed in the New York Times, Artforum, Modern Painters, Frieze, Photograph, Cabinet, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Der Standard, INCITE Journal of Experimental Media, and on NPR, among other media outlets and scholarly publications. She has been awarded 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 (2004, 2007, and 2016). She recently received a 2019 City of Los Angeles (COLA) Individual Artist Fellowship. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Mint Museum; Philbrook Museum of Art; Boise Art Museum; Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art at Rollins College; Carl and Marilynn Thoma Foundation, and the RISD Museum, where a series of 12 film quilts is currently on permanent display. In 2015 she was awarded a NY Public Art Project commission for her first public art project, a large scale photographic collage printed on glass, which was installed permanently at an elementary school in the Bronx in 2017. She was born in Washington D.C. in 1977 to an Austrian father and American mother. She received a BA with honors in art/semiotics from Brown University. She studied video with VALIE EXPORT in Salzburg, Austria, and received her MFA from Bard College. She lived in New York City from 2000 – 2015, and currently live in Los Angeles, CA, where she is represented by Shoshana Wayne Gallery.

This screening is part of Punctures: Textiles in Digital and Material Time. Consisting of three exhibitions and public programs that weave into each other, Punctures features artists who are invested in the intersections and history of textile practices, media art, and critical and liberatory politics, including trans fashion and domesticity; gendered and immigrant labor under global racial capitalism; Gelede women’s commemoration, protest and power as represented in textile work; speculative future-casting through Oglala Lakota knowledge systems, and more. The exhibition features installations by Betty Yu, Cecilia Vicuña, Charlie Best, Eniola Dawodu, Kite, and Sabrina Gschwandtner, performances by Charlie Best, Jodi Lynn Maracle, and Kite, and screenings of work by Jodie Mack, Pat Ferrero, Sabrina Gschwandtner, and Wang Bing. Punctures design by Kelly Walters.

Banner image: Sabrina Gschwandtner, no idle hands, 9:43min, Super 8 film transferred to video, sound, 2008