Stefanie Schneider
Strange Math (The Princess and her Lover)
2007

Name: Strange Math (The Princess and her Lover)
Brand: Stefanie Schneider
Price: 380 USD
Availability: InStock

About the Item

Strange Math (The Princess and her Lover) - 2007 part of the 29 Palms, CA project. Edition of 10, 20x24cm. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Signature label and Certificate. Artist Inventory # 7098. Not mounted. The works of Stefanie Schneider evoke Ed Ruscha's obsession with the American experience, the richness of Georgia O'Keefe's deserts and the loneliness of Edward Hopper's haunting paintings. So how exactly did this German photographer become one of the most important artists of the American narrative of the 20th and 21st century? Stefanie Schneider was born and raised in Germany but lives and works in Southern California. Exploring the American dream and capturing it with Polaroid instant film. Situated on the verge of an elusive super-reality, her photographic sequences provide the ambience for loosely woven story lines and a cast of phantasmic characters that reflect a part of the narrators life told from her perspective. Often about love, communication. sexuality and relationships. Schneider works with the chemical mutations of expired Polaroid film stock. Chemical explosions of color spreading across the surfaces undermine the photograph's commitment to reality and induce her characters into trance-like dream scapes. Like flickering sequences of old road movies Schneider's images seem to evaporate before conclusions can be made - their ephemeral reality manifesting in subtle gestures and mysterious motives. Schneider's images refuse to succumb to reality, they keep alive the confusions of dream, desire, fact, and fiction yet they also explore the relationship with the medium and the viewer. The wabi-sabi 'ness' of Schneider's work can not be denied or ignored. It's a step of acceptance of 'flaws', gaps and distortions. Missing pieces of the puzzle. The artist flaunts, uses and exposes the unknown using expired Polaroid instant film intentionally. Presents it. What you do with that is up to you. That missing part of the picture is for you to include yourself, you fill it in with yourself. That might be critical that it's there at all, missing and missing the entire point all together or by filling in the unknown with their own imagination. Even their own memories which then integrates the viewer and artist as one with limitless potential. Stefanie Schneider's new photographic works tell fantastic stories about her adopted Californian home. She seeks out faded American myths and distills a charged reality in a very personal and surprising way. She uses out-of-date Polaroid film, and the blemishes caused by the degenerated film stock, - are included in the composition in a painterly way. Exposure mistakes and low budget movie effects are combined to alienating effect. Everything shimmers and flickers before our eyes. The artist plays with the authentic poetry of the amateur, mixing strangely dreamy staging with random photochemical events. In the 16-part work Frozen, which is characterized by a strangely transcendent mood in the lighting, film-still-like pictorial clusters come together to form a mysterious story, with the artist herself as the lonely protagonist. the aesthetic is reminiscent of early Lynch films. The components of the elliptically choreographed events are scenes from an enchanted, gleaming winter landscape, together with "staged snapshots" of a pale young woman in her underskirts, who radiates the troubled reality of a mirage with her sleep walking presence. The story is presented in the manner of cinematic flashbacks or dream sequences. Stage blood and a knife are used to evoke a crime of passion whose surreal attractiveness is derived from the scenic openness of what is shown. The deliberate use of old instant picture stock establishes in a richly faceted way the ephemeral quality of vulnerability and transience within a reality that is brittle from the outset. The American Stars and Stripes, recently updated as the absolute epitome of a patriotic signifier, is the subject of the 9-part work Primary Colors (2001). Schneider's reassuringly European view, free of undue emotion, presents the Stars and Stripes motif in a strangely alienated form: she shows stills with phases of fluttering violently in the wind, even torn in some cases, and the expired film stock emphasizes the fragility of the icon even more. FlashART - Sabine Dorothee Lehner (translated from German by Michael Robinson) I am trying to get this to all add up.  Feelings and numbers - like apples and oranges really.   Somehow I think that the 150,000 dollars I am going to get in 25 minutes from the man I only know as phone number 760 ..... will release me from the incalculable seconds, minutes, hours of pathetic suffering. Strange math. But there are more numbers I should tell you about. But first a few points.  I am a princess from a country that hasn't existed in the form that I once knew for at least 22 years (another number - you see?) I used to love to tell people that I was a princess.   I had a good feeling for the right time to tell someone.  You have to pick the moment carefully because in America that sort of information can really turn someone off. This confused me because there are so many fairy tales here about princesses - young girls discovering they are princesses, young princesses running away from their royal station just to have some fun.  But the reality of the princess situation is that people here seem to prefer to see this play out on their screen or in a tabloid being an actually princess, especially someone as strange and broke as myself does not seem to be a winning revelation to all people.  At any rate, there are those great moments - oh and how I love those moments - when I realize that I am faced with a person that will be truly impressed by this information.  I savor the thought, my blood pulses, my heart races, I am positively titillated by the idea of impressing someone with my real royal lineage.  I can't wait to casually tell them that I am a princess and then pretend to not want to talk about the difficulties of growing up with that kind of reality.  The reality that I never mention is that it was a bloody, heartbreaking, and awful story that happened so long ago it seems as if I am recalling another person's story altogether.  There are also the times where I am so desperately insecure and drunk that I just drop this information out of nowhere into the middle of a conversation about something completely unrelated. I don't care how strange it seems - I want them to know that I am special and that hopefully, now, they will like me.  You see, I have a terrible trait - I like to be admired or wanted for something superficial - either looks, money, or title.  In a partial defense of this revolting statement I would like to add that I was not always this way. I've spent spend much of my life contemplating metaphysical questions and doing a lot of reading and writing (approximately 10 years)  But I turned on a dime - I rejected this approach about 395 days ago - and now all I want is to be loved for my genetics - the god given silkiness of my hair, the color of my eyes, or my royal ranking - all things out of my control - having nothing to do with my will.  I want nothing to do with what someone loves about me. I can't bear that sort of responsibility.  I want to be loved by the most beautiful man in the world-  I want this even more now that I am losing everything that I was given and especially now that I have grown to despise what I have created for myself in this world - unpublished novels, desperate poems, lost nights, empty days, poverty, and now the bloom is so far off the rose I want to change everything about my looks so I can't remember who I was or who I wanted to be.  So, the numbers game.  32 - my age  8 - the number of the bus line I met him on.  4 - the age I was when rebels threw my family out of power.  Also the age I was when my father died peacefully in his sleep just 10 days before the violent takeover he would never know a thing about (I don't believe in souls, ghosts, or anything that would lead me to believe he saw what happened to me or us from the afterworld, if he did see this steady decline I would hate him for his weakness and inability to do anything about the life I was left)  5 - how old I was the last time I saw my mother.  16 - the last time I saw my brother.   34 - the original number of stones in my mother's crown.  31 - the number of stones left in the aforementioned crown.  45 - the number of days he let me love him. 2 - the number of days he believed he was in love with me.   7 - the number of days since I saw him last   150,000 - the amount of money I am going to receive for the sale of this crown  what all of this adds up to:   0 - the number of days I have left for me as Princess Soraya on this planet. written by Nadia Conners for the 29 Palms, CA project

Creator:

Stefanie Schneider (1968, German)

Creation Year:

2007

Dimensions:

Height: 7.88 in (20 cm)Width: 9.45 in (24 cm)Depth: 0.04 in (1 mm)

Medium:

C Print,Polaroid,Archival Paper,Photographic Paper

Movement & Style:

Contemporary

Period:

2000-2009