Films — SARA SOWELL - artist & video editor

Guesstimating the impact of artist film across the private airlines of the Kardashian-Jenners. Film turns facts into flicker*. Hand-processed color negative film.

Press:
Keeping Up with the Klimate - LA Review of Books written by Hannah Bonner

25 Great Experimental Films of 2023 by Michael Sicinski

*flicker warning

Color Negative
16mm, optical sound
6 mins, 2023

THE INDIVIDUAL
Two-channel 16mm film,
optical sound, 28 minutes
2024

Marcel Duchamp invents a new identity of himself.
As a woman.

He re-names himself Rrose Sélavy, an ambiguous pun in french.

The artist is his own work of art. No point in trying to paint or sculpt other bodies. Only his own is allowed, and only when reproduced by mechanical means.

A speculative reimagining of artworks, events, and artists of Dada between 1912-1923, 100 years later. Paradoxes between image-making, representation, photography, capital and language are examined and embodied. Appropriating Man Ray's autobiography as a point of departure, other sources include writings from Rosalind Krauss, Claude Cahun and Kathy Acker.

Dada’s Daughter is an expanded cinema performance using 16mm projections and a live score using cinema-objects.

The performance is introduced with hand-developed black and white 16mm photograms made from the imprints of microplastic stars, tacks, jewelry, and industrial scrap metal. This process of exposing objects onto celluloid is drawn from Man Ray’s “rayographs” produced as early as 1923. Spliced in between these images are sections of clear film leader that cue a live performance re-animating the cinema-objects used to create the photograms.

When placed in front of the projector these objects create tactile optical images; impressions of form, shape and pattern that reenact the photogram process. The presence of the photogram reel and performative qualities of this work highlight the tension between ontological concepts of cinema – the material and the ephemeral.

DADA’S DAUGHTER

expanded-cinema performance
2021-ongoing

Perpetual Inventory: Dada’s Daughter and other expanded works

Solo exhibition at Underscore, Milwaukee, WI
Documentation by Michael Lagerman

Perpetual Inventory: Dada’s Daughter and other expanded works
Solo exhibition at Underscore, Milwaukee, WI
Documentation by Michael Lagerman

This material survey borrows its name from art critic Rosalind Krauss’s accumulative collection of essays charting the “myth” of “the master narrative of modern art” in the “post-medium condition”. Analogizing Krauss’s inventory of art-allegory to my impulse to re-materialize, destabilize, and fictionalize? Is restaging a work a criticism, or is it art history’s terminal condition? Is recycling images an act of resistance or a reestablishment of homogeneity?

Conjuring Freud's id while watching America’s Next Top Model. Black & white 16mm hand-processed in Milwaukee, WI.
Text by Kirsten Schmid, film by Sara Sowell 2021.

Screenings:
2022
- CROSSROADS – San Fransisco, CA
- TRANÅS AT THE FRINGE – Tranås, Sweden
- April: Group show performance at Deluge Contemporary Art – Victoria, BC
- Peripheries Experimental Film & Video Festival
- Athens International Film + Video Festival
- Cineseries at The Wexner Center for the Arts
- Film Girl Film Festival
- Fisura International Festival of Experimental Film & Video

2021
- Milwaukee Underground Film Festival
- Antimatter [Media Art] Festival
- ANOLOGICA SELECTION 11

“Glamour and expectations are hijacked to reveal fissures in the performance of emotional veracity on a reality TV competition. Through solarization of B&W film stock and manipulation of source materials intercut with a parallel text, an altogether more primal reading is revealed, ‘Conjuring Freud's id while watching America’s Next Top Model.’”
– Deluge Contemporary Art

”The Girl Who Is, by Milwaukee’s Sara Sowell, is a deconstruction of television footage (in this case, Tyra Banks and America’s Next Top Model) that recalls certain works by Kurt Kren, or even Christopher Harris’ Reckless Eyeballing. But she reassembles the images and sounds into disconcerting shards, taking a relatively commonplace idea (the beauty standard and its effects on women) and making it palpably felt.”
- Michael Sicinski, Crossroads ‘22 In Review Online

THE GIRL WHO IS

16mm>digital single-channel film
6 mins, 2021

Spectrum Spread is an experiment in graphic relationships, superimposing 1940’s Hollywood star Hedy Lamarr in Ziegfeld Girl with footage of atomic bomb films produced in the southwest by the U.S. government.

link available upon request

Spectrum Spread

16mm>digital single-channel film
3 minutes 35 seconds, 2022

RHYTHM AS A GIRL is an experimental essay film that challenges notions of hierarchy within visual, bodily, and spiritual systems used by painters Hilma af Klint and Mark Rothko. af Klint's notes guide us through the 20th century and the artist's burgeoning understanding of perception and sensations. film by Sara Sowell 2020.

Screenings:
2022, Cineseries at The Wexner Center for the Arts
2021, Athens International Film + Video Festival
2021, Honorable Mention: Deep Focus Film Festival
2021, Femfest Video Showcase, Cactus Club
2021, Big Muddy Film Festival
2020, Antimatter [Media Art] Film Festival
2020, Film Girl Film Festival

link available upon request

RHYTHM AS A GIRL

digital single-channel film
12 mins, 2020

INTERIORS IN MOTION

digital single-channel installation
8 min loop, 2018

Interiors in Motion (WIND/MIND) is a projected video & sound work installed at the Le Petit Versailles Garden, a non-profit community arts garden in the East Village, NYC 2018.

This work is comprised of displaced familiar imagery, producing texture within rhythms of image-processing, how they sway, mirror and bond within the shadow of psyche.

The garden was chosen to invite the soundscape of New York City to effect the dichotomy of public and interior spaces. This installation was free and open to the public.

Edited Work