Skip to main content
Want more images or videos?
Request additional images or videos from the seller
1 of 9

Stefanie Schneider
Reload! (Wastelands) - mounted - Polaroid, Contemporary, 21st Century, Color

2003

About the Item

Reload! - I changed my mind (Wastelands) - 2003 Edition 2/5, 57x56cm, Analog C-Print, hand-printed by the artist on Fuji Crystal Archive Paper, based on the Polaroid, Artist inventory Number 1173.02, Mounted on Aluminum with matte UV-Protection. Signed on verso. Offered is a piece from the Wastelands series. Published in: Wastelands, published by edition braus, Wachter Verlag, Heidelberg, 2006 (monograph) Exhibited: Wastelands, Städtische Galerie, Waldkraiburg, Germany (S) (2006) / Wastelands, Zephyr, Mannheim, Germany (S) (catalog) (2006) Wastelands, Kunstverein Recklinghausen, Germany (S) (2007), Stranger Than Paradise, Scott White Contemporary, San Diego, (S) (2012) Reality with the Tequila: Stefanie Schneider’s Fertile Wasteland by James Scarborough “How much more than enough for you for I for both of us darling?” (E. E. Cummings) Until he met her, his destiny was his own. Petty and inconsequential but still his own. He was cocksure and free, young and unaccountable, with dark hair and aquiline features. His expression was always pensive, a little troubled, but not of a maniacal sort. He was more bored than anything else. With a heart capable of violence. Until she met him, she was pretty but unappreciated. Her soul had regis- tered no seismic activity. Dust bowl weary, she’d yet to see better days. A languorous body, a sweet face with eyes that could be kind if so inclined. Until she met him, she had not been inclined. It began when he met her. She was struck in an instant by his ennui. The sum of their meeting was greater than the imbroglios and chicaneries of their respective existences. He was struck by the blank slate look in her eyes. They walked, detached and focused on the immediate, obscenely unaware of pending change across a terrain of mountainous desert, their eyes downcast and world-weary, unable to account for the buoyant feeling in her heart. His hard-guy shtick went from potentiality to ruse. The gun was not a weapon but a prop, a way to pass time. Neither saw the dark clouds massing on the horizon. They found themselves alone in the expanses of time, unaware of the calamity that percolated even as they posed like school kids for the pic- tures. Happiness brimmed in that wild terrain. Maybe things were begin- ning to look up. That’s when the shooting started… Stefanie Schneider assumes that our experience of lived reality (buying groceries, having a relationship with someone, driving a car) does not correspond to the actual nature of lived reality itself, that what we think of as reality is more like a margarita without the tequila. Stefanie Schneider’s reality is reality with the tequila. She does not abol- ish concepts that orient us, cause and effect, time, plot, and story line, she just plays with them. She invites us to play with them, too. She offers us a hybrid reality, more amorphous than that with a conventional subject, verb, and predicate. Open-ended, this hybrid reality does not resolve itself. It frustrates anyone with pedestrian expectations but once we inebriate those expectations away, her work exhilarates us and even the hangover is good. An exploration of how she undermines our expectation of what we assume to be our lived reality, the reasons why she under- mines our expectations, and the end-result, as posited in this book, will show how she bursts open our apparatus of perception and acknowl- edges life’s fluidity, its density, its complexity. Its beauty. She undermines expectations of our experience of reality with odd, other- worldly images and with startling and unexpected compressions and expansions of time and narrative sequence. The landscape seems familiar enough, scenes from the Old West: broad panoramic vistas with rolling hills dotted with trees and chaparral, dusty prairies with trees and shrubs and craggy rocks, close-up shots of trees. But they’re not familiar. These mis-en-scenes radiate an unsettling Picasso Blue Period glow or the intense celestial blue of the cafe skies that Van Gogh painted in the south of France. Yellow starbursts punctuate images as if seen through the viewfinder of a flying saucer. At the same time, objects appear both vintage and futuristic, the landscape of a post-apocalyptic world. Landscapes change seemingly at random as do the seasons. Stefanie Schneider offers no indication of how time flows here, except that it con- ceivably turns in on itself and then goes its merry way. Time is a river whose source is a deep murky spring which blusters about with an occasional swirling eddy. That Stefanie Schneider thwarts an easy reading is obvious but why does she do this? Since she will not countenance anything linear, logical, or sequential, and because she does not relish anything concrete and specific, she has to roil things up a bit. Nor does she seem comfortable with a book of images that is settled, discrete, and accountable. Instead she wants to create a panoply of anxious moments that refuse to settle down into any predetermined reading. She seeks to assemble the ele- ments, establish a provisional cosmology and then let each of us bring our own life experiences to bear on the enterprise. She unravels the paucity of a universe compromised by a matrix of either/or and replaces it with a kaleidoscopic neither/both cornucopia. No fan of Descartes, she does not adhere to anything predicated on cogito ergo sum. No, the chance to present a universe of limitless iterations and utterances, open-ended, casualty-thwarting, intrigues her. She broaches a Heraclitan world: she shows that attempts to master, manage, and hoard time prove to be as elusive as a blind man trying to grab a salmon barehanded from a cold mountain stream. Even within the clear cut parameters of the Old West universe onto which she gloms, she shows that time is a bandit, that it is a mirage, that it is as unpredictable as it is indefinable and infinite. She coaxes us, scene by scene a slow- motion, out-ofsequence film clip, to agree with her that a running moat of lived reality easily overwhelms a castle of rationality. Stefanie Schneider does not mount a demolition effort much less a de- construction one. Rather, she dismantles our expectations and sets about rebuilding not things but their connections anew. She is the mistress of the synapses. Indeed all these annoying ambiguities and irritating am- biances set the stage for a very particular certainty, one kernel of truth amidst these skewed and open-ended fields of inquiry. What connects all these images, in whatever order they might be presented1, is what I call an Augenblick, the mental distance between each page in whose ex- panse occurs the processing of shards of lived experience between these blinks of an eye that comprise the pages of Wastelands. During these innumerous Augenblicke, we take whatever shifts and turns that Stefanie Schneider throws at us, recalibrate our bearings, and then move on, at least until the next inevitable obstruction. Irritating (and enlightening) as these shots may be, they’re nothing new. Rilke writes that, instead of trying to understand the quiddities of things, we should just be joyous at their mystery, just assume that they’re written in a lovely script that neither you nor anyone else can ever understand. Keats writes about being “awake forever in a sweet unrest,” although he’s talking about love. Stefanie Schneider makes us work for this idea of an Augenblick, but the result is worth it. The scenes and their sequencing dazzle us in a Borgesian Hall of Mirrors. Stefanie Schneider shows us that reality is anything but linear and user-friendly, but once one becomes accustomed to her enhanced dimension of space and time, we see the world in all its multifarious beauty and rapture. For that reason, Stefanie Schneider’s Augenblicke show us that reality may be a wasteland but it is as fertile as fertile can be. 1 I refer to Julio Cortazar’s novel, Hopscotch, in which he presents his story in a linear way, with consecutive chapters that follow a particular coherence. In a note at the be- ginning of the novel, he suggests an alternative reading via a new sequence of chapters. So instead of reading chapter 1 first, chapter 2 second, you read, say chapter 57 first, chapter 32 second, chapter 1 third and so on to form a new story. Similarly, Stefanie Schneider’s Wastelands offers a multitude of coherences.
More From This SellerView All
  • White Trash Beautiful I - 29 Palms, CA featuring Radha Mitchell
    By Stefanie Schneider
    Located in Morongo Valley, CA
    White Trash Beautiful I (29 Palms, CA) featuring Radha Mitchell - 1999 128x125cm, Edition 3/5. Analog C-Print, hand-printed by the artist on Fuji Crystal Archive Paper, based o...
    Category

    Early 2000s Contemporary Color Photography

    Materials

    Archival Paper, Photographic Paper, C Print, Color, Polaroid

  • Accident II - with Ewan McGregor and Ryan Gosling, Polaroid, 21st Century, Color
    By Stefanie Schneider
    Located in Morongo Valley, CA
    A piece of art from the movie 'Stay' by Stefanie Schneider Stefanie created the art for both main actors Naomi Watts and Ryan Gosling in the movie 'Stay' directed by Marc Forster. S...
    Category

    Early 2000s Contemporary Figurative Photography

    Materials

    C Print, Color, Polaroid, Archival Paper, Photographic Paper

  • Daisy in front of Trailer (Till Death do Us Part ) 48x47cm, + Soundtrack LP
    By Stefanie Schneider
    Located in Morongo Valley, CA
    Daisy in front of Trailer (Till Death do Us Part) - 2005 Edition 4/5, 48 x 47 cm. Analog C-Print, printed on Fuji Crystal Archive Paper, hand-printed by the artist, based on the Polaroid. Artist inventory 9250. Signature label and certificate. Not mounted. This Edition comes with the vinyl soundtrack of "Till Death Do Us Part" (directed by Stefanie Schneider), music by Daisy McCrackin. Stefanie Schneider’s Till Death Do Us Part or “There is Only the Desert for You.” BY DREW HAMMOND Stefanie Schneider’s Till Death to Us Part is a love narrative that comprises three elements: 1. A montage of still images shot and elaborated by means of her signature technique of using Polaroid formats with outdated and degraded film stock in natural light, with the resulting images rephotographed (by other means) enlarged and printed in such a way as to generate further distortions of the image. 2. Dated Super 8 film footage without a sound track and developed by the artist. 3. Recorded off-screen narration of texts written by the actors or photographic subjects, and selected by the artist. At the outset, this method presupposes a tension between still and moving image; between the conventions about the juxtaposition of such images in a moving image presentation; and, and a further tension between the work’s juxtaposition of sound and image, and the conventional relationship between sound and image that occurs in the majority of films. But Till Death Do Us Part also conduces to an implied synthesis of still and moving image by the manner in which the artist edits or cuts the work. First, she imposes a rigorous criterion of selection, whether to render a section as a still or moving image. The predominance of still images is neither an arbitrary residue of her background as a still photographer—in fact she has years of background in film projects; nor is it a capricious reaction against moving picture convention that demands more moving images than stills. Instead, the number of still images has a direct thematic relation to the fabric of the love story in the following sense. Stills, by definition, have a very different relationship to time than do moving images. The unedited moving shot occurs in real-time, and the edited moving shot, despite its artificial rendering of time, all too often affords the viewer an even greater illusion of experiencing reality as it unfolds. It is self-evident that moving images overtly mimic the temporal dynamic of reality. Frozen in time—at least overtly—still photographic images pose a radical tension with real time. This tension is all the more heightened by their “real” content, by the recording aspect of their constitution. But precisely because they seem to suspend time, they more naturally evoke a sense of the past and of its inherent nostalgia. In this way, they are often more readily evocative of other states of experience of the real, if we properly include in the real our own experience of the past through memory, and its inherent emotions. This attribute of stills is the real criterion of their selection in Til Death...
    Category

    Early 2000s Contemporary Color Photography

    Materials

    Archival Paper, Photographic Paper, C Print, Color, Polaroid

  • Sunset II (Till Death do us Part) - Polaroid, Contemporary, 21st Century, Women
    By Stefanie Schneider
    Located in Morongo Valley, CA
    Sunset II (Till Death do us Part) 90x112cm, Edition 1/5, 2005 Analog C-Print print, hand-printed by the artist, based on a Polaroid. Signed on verso Artist Inventory No. 9495.01. ...
    Category

    Early 2000s Contemporary Color Photography

    Materials

    Metal

  • Sunset (Till Death do us Part) - Polaroid, Contemporary, 21st Century, Women
    By Stefanie Schneider
    Located in Morongo Valley, CA
    Sunset (Till Death do us Part) 90x112cm, Edition 1/5, 2005 Analog C-Print, hand-printed by the artist, based on a Polaroid. Artist Inventory No. 9493.01. Mounted on Aluminum with...
    Category

    Early 2000s Contemporary Color Photography

    Materials

    Metal

  • Boy with Silver Mask - Stay, 128x125cm, analog, not mounted
    By Stefanie Schneider
    Located in Morongo Valley, CA
    Boy with Silver Mask (Stay), 2006, 128x125cm, Edition of 1/5, analog C-Print, hand-printed by the artist, based on a Polaroid, not mounted, signature label and certificate, artist ...
    Category

    Early 2000s Contemporary Figurative Photography

    Materials

    Color, Polaroid, Archival Paper, Photographic Paper, C Print

You May Also Like
  • Tyler Shields - Legs in the Gold Room, Photography 2024, Printed After
    By Tyler Shields
    Located in Greenwich, CT
    Series: Indulgence Chromogenic Print on Kodak Endura Luster Paper All available sizes and editions: 18" x 18" 30" x 30" 45" x 45" 60" x 60" 70" x 70" Editions of 3 + 2 Artist Proofs ...
    Category

    2010s Contemporary Figurative Photography

    Materials

    Luster, Paper, Archival Paper, Photographic Paper, C Print, Archival Pig...

  • Tyler Shields - High heels (This is not a reflection), 2024, Printed After
    By Tyler Shields
    Located in Greenwich, CT
    Series: Indulgence Chromogenic Print on Kodak Endura Luster Paper All available sizes and editions: 18" x 18" 30" x 30" 45" x 45" 60" x 60" 70" x 70" Editions of 3 + 2 Artist Proofs ...
    Category

    2010s Contemporary Figurative Photography

    Materials

    Luster, Paper, Archival Paper, Photographic Paper, C Print, Digital, Arc...

  • Tyler Shields - Strawberry, Photography 2024, Printed After
    By Tyler Shields
    Located in Greenwich, CT
    Series: Indulgence Chromogenic Print on Kodak Endura Luster Paper All available sizes and editions: 18" x 18" 30" x 30" 45" x 45" 60" x 60" Editions of 3 + 2 Artist Proofs Tyler Shi...
    Category

    2010s Contemporary Figurative Photography

    Materials

    Luster, Paper, Archival Paper, Photographic Paper, C Print, Digital, Arc...

  • Tyler Shields - Pills, Photography 2014, Printed After
    By Tyler Shields
    Located in Greenwich, CT
    Series: Mouths Chromogenic Print on Kodak Endura Luster Paper All available sizes and editions: 20" x 30" 30" x 40" 40" x 60" 48" x 72" 63" x 84" Editions of 3 + 2 Artist Proofs Tyl...
    Category

    2010s Contemporary Color Photography

    Materials

    Luster, Archival Paper, Photographic Paper, C Print, Digital, Archival P...

  • Tyler Shields - Odysseus, Photography 2015, Printed After
    By Tyler Shields
    Located in Greenwich, CT
    Series: Sirens Chromogenic Print on Kodak Endura Luster Paper All available sizes and editions: 20" x 30" 40" x 60" 48" x 72" 63" x 84" Editions of 3 + 2 Artist Proof The idea behi...
    Category

    2010s Contemporary Color Photography

    Materials

    Luster, Archival Paper, Photographic Paper, C Print, Digital, Archival P...

  • Tyler Shields - Picnic, Photography 2018, Printed After
    By Tyler Shields
    Located in Greenwich, CT
    Series: Suspense Chromogenic Print on Kodak Endura Luster Paper All available sizes and editions: 20" x 30" 30" x 40" 40" x 60" 48" x 72" 63" x 84" Editions of 3 + 2 Artist Proofs T...
    Category

    2010s Contemporary Color Photography

    Materials

    Luster, Digital Pigment, Archival Pigment, Digital, C Print, Photographi...

Recently Viewed

View All