Madame’s Cravings (Red Lollipop), 2025 35 mm b/w polyester film, polyester thread, etching ink, LEDs 19 3/4 x 20 x 3 inches

Madame’s Cravings (Red Diamond),, 2025 35mm b/w polyester film, polyester thread, etching ink, LEDs 17 x 17 1/4 x 3 inches

at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Los Angeles, 

  Nov 1 2025 January 10 2026    

she makes me happy  

by Rosanna Albertini

She doesn’t need to split off from the fullness of life. She swims in it, stitching together private stories — her mother’s voice about her life before Roe —  with images of American stories far from our present or we believe they are far, as we ignore they existed. Their film version was mainly ignored, but the effects of legal/political decisions on giving birth, having the freedom or the medical necessity of not to do it, are and were visible to everybody.

Time is endlessly dark, hiding the edges of things. So this artist works on the edges: sewing into geometrical figures fragments of 35mm polyester film with polyester thread, and painting colored ink on sections of film. Kept in their regular sequence the photograms stretch the most simple gesture into a long geometrical time. Madame’s Cravings, a 1906 b&w film, becomes a dismembered story in film-quilts. The same happens to a 1934 documentary showing doctors and midwives on horseback in the snow riding to deliver home care in rural Appalachia. 

Imagine a pond with all these quilts like floating flowers… Yes they are vertical on the walls, and yet… In each of them the limited time of the original films disappears, and the layout is playful; the translation of moving images in a still system makes me think of a new birth helped by the artist’s hands, by her smiling mind. They float in my mind. 

The Forgotten Frontier (Kentucky Star), 2025 35 mm polyester b/w film, polyester thread, LEDs 27 3/8 x 27 1/8 x 3 inches

Madame’s Cravings (Absinthe), 2025 35 mm polyester b/w film, polyester thread, etching ink, LEDs 19 3/4 x 20 x 3 inches

Madame’s Cravings: Sweet, Bitter, Smoky,, 2025 35 mm film, polyester thread, etching ink, LEDs 19 x 19 x 3 inches

Reality remains, an unfriendly swing that seems to escape from human measure, feelings and physical risks. Legal, illegal, what? What’s humanly convenient? What’s a decision? An executioner’s sword chopping a previous decision? A glimpse into the past tastes like a bitter medicine, and yet it helps to perceive what’s really real: reality moves and changes. Timing is not geological. Things happen at human measure. No one more than an artist knows it. Each art piece comes out of the struggle between the single, personal effort to be in the world with an eye on its infinite possibilities, and a castle of facts all around that only look able to be here always, trying to obliterate any contrast, any “other condition.” ( Robert Musil) It can happen that the castle crumbles before the goal is reached. 

“Therefore there is the universe.

Because it is flying around.

It is interesting.

Anything that is flying around is interesting.

Human nature government propaganda is not flying around adventure is not flying around, it is flying to or from therefore it is not interesting.

And romance and the human mind.

….

The human mind is interesting and the universe.

About romance well supposing we just like it like that but not by definition.”

That’s a different story, The Geographical History of America by Gertrude Stein, 1936.

Sabrina Gschwandtner’s as well as Gertrude’s art make me happy. In the film-quilts beginning and end disappear. Movements appear and turn and bring us in, and we don’t disappear. In Gertrude’s pages we get mad at our own impatience, stumble over the words that are often jewels, we do not get lost. 

“One participates in things (understands their language). In this condition understanding is not impersonal (objective), but extremely personal, like an agreement between subject and object.

In this condition one really knows everything in advance, and the things merely confirm it. (Knowing is re-knowing.)”

Robert Musil not afraid of subjectivity. 

That’s why the film-quilts are flowers. I’m trying to bring Sabrina’s art out of art formalisms. Back into the big world she has embraced with humor and intelligence. Nothing could be better than the subversive idea she had picking a story where the pregnant mother smokes a cigar, steals candies, drinks absinthe and in the end, quite naturally, squats down on a cabbage. The baby is born. A nativity? Why not? 

We are in “the art of the every day.” 

1984  Allen Ruppersberg, Fifty helpful hints on the art of the every day:

I pick five of them:

“Art should be familiar and enigmatic, as are human beings.

“Use everything.

“Art should make use of common methods and materials so there is little difference between the talk and the the talked about.

“There is a quotidian sense of loss and tragedy.

“The individual search for the secret of life and death. That is the inspiration and the key.”

Madame’s Cravings (Yellow Lollipop), 2025 35mm b/w polyester film, polyester thread, etching ink, LEDs 19 3/4 x 20 x 3 inches

Madame’s Cravings (B/W),, 2025 35 mm b/w polyester film, polyester thread, LEDs 72 x 48 inches

BIBLIOGRAPHY and FILMOGRAPHY

Alice Guy-Blaché, Madame’s Cravings, B7W 35 mm. film, 1906

Marvin Breckinridge, Chronicles from the Frontier Nursing Service, documentary film, 1931

(after the 1934 Hays Code, childbirth and abortion disappeared from American cinema for decades)

Robert Musil, Precision and the Soul, edited and translated by Burton Pike and S. Luft. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London, 1990. Paperback edition, 1994

Gertrude Stein, The Geographical History of America, Copyright 1936 by Random House, Inc. The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore & London, 1995. The John Hopkins paperback edition, 1995, was published by arrangement with Random House, Inc. 

Allen Ruppersberg,  The Secret of Life and Death, The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Black Sparrow Press, February 1985. Published in occasion of Allen Ruppersberg’s retrospective exhibition at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.