Films — SARA SOWELL

Perpetual Inventory
Dada’s Daughter
Color Negative
Spectrum Spread
The Girl Who Is
Rhythm as a Girl

I am an artist and filmmaker working in 16mm film, installation and performance. My work engages in a formal inquiry of artistic labor by rephotographing pre-existing media in tandem with original text and image. In my expanded cinematic work, consider display as a formal strategy jointly to reflect on the historical institution of cinema and interrogate its present condition. In work such as Dada’s Daughter and Perpetual Inventory, my hand-made film material is fully realized through its exhibition in galleries, classrooms, museums, and basements, in which the environment becomes the context in which the viewer reads the work.

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

Perpetual Inventory(1) is an exploration of canonical cinema—from the global establishment of Dada in the 1920s to the structural(2) films of the 1970s by film artists like Paul Sharits. Using film I accumulate historical precedents into a non-linear, material narrative(3).

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”(4) in the “post-medium condition”(5). 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?(6)

1 Perpetual Inventory; Introduction. “In a conversation with Barbara Rose, Robert Rauschenberg mused on the title for a future work. ‘I went in for my interview for this fantastic job,’ he said. ‘The job had a great name–I might use it for a painting–’Perpetual Inventory’.”

2 Paul Sharits: Dream Displacement and Other Projects. “[The] will towards abstraction runs deep within the tradition of Independent Cinema. Its most aggressive, single-minded emergence has been the work of the last ten years in what P. Adams Sitney has called the Structural Film. With this title Sitney refers to [redacted]. By this term he means to indicate ‘a cinema of structure in which the shape of the whole film is predetermines and simplified, and it is that shape which is the primal impression of the film.’”

3 Notes on the Index: Part 1. “Duchamp’s relationship to the issue of the indexical sign, or rather, the way his art serves as a matrix for a related set of ideas which connect to one another through the axis of the index, is too important a precedent (I am not concerned here with the question of ‘influence’) for 70’s art, not to explore it. For as we will see, it is Duchamp who first establishes the connection between the index (as a type of sign) and the photograph.”

4 Perpetual Inventory; Introduction. “The master narrative of modern art turns on the importance of specific aesthetic mediums understood as simultaneously empowering artistic practice and leveraging the works’ possibility of meaning”

5 Perpetual Inventory; Introduction. “If this effort works against the grain of the received ideas of contemporary criticism, I welcome this antagonism, which also characterized the work collected in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. I consider the ‘post-medium condition’ a monstrous myth. If Perpetual Inventory can expose it by its example of an alternative, I will consider the book a success.”

6 Formlessness; No to… Joseph Beuys. “On the contrary, what interested Bataille was the fact that homogenous society, anxious to submit everything to the laws of efficiency and thus to recycle all its products, nonetheless produces waste that it cannot assimilate – excremental waste that builds up as a heterogeneous threat.”

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.

TRT: 30-40 minutes

2022 Performances:
- Antimatter [Media Art] – Victoria, BC
- Revolutions Per Minute 22 – Boston, MA
- Baltic Analog Lab – Cesis, Latvia
- Millennium Film Workshop – Brooklyn, NY
- Nightingale Cinema – Chicago, IL
- Milwaukee Film Festival, Oriental Theatre Installation – Milwaukee, WI
- Milwaukee Underground Film Festival – Milwaukee, WI
- Cineseries at The Wexner Center for the Arts – Columbus, OH
- Underscore Projects – Milwaukee, WI

DADA’S DAUGHTER

expanded-cinema performance
2021-ongoing

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

flicker warning

Color Negative
16mm, optical sound
6 mins, 2023

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

A speculative account of Dada and Surrealist aesthetics between 1916-1945, adapted from artist Man Ray’s autobiography Self Portrait. Artworks recreated in the film include the Return to Reason (1923), Marcel Duchamp’s spirals from Anemic Cinema (1926, filmed by Man Ray), various objects and assemblages, and solarized portraits.

THE INDIVIDUAL

16mm, ongoing

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