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Stefanie Schneider
Breathing IV (Deconstructivism) - Contemporary, Expired Polaroid

2015

About the Item

Breathing IV (Deconstructivism) - 2015 - about the narrative potential of images. 20x20cm, Edition of 10, Archival C-Print, based on a Polaroid, Artist Inventory 15834. Signature label and Certificate. Not mounted. Stefanie Schneider artist statement: Desolation and solitude are two adjectives that I would use to describe my Polaroid photographs, another would be the Japanese term 'Wabi-Sabi. The simplicity of 'flawed beauty' comes from the expired film I use to create a reflection of love and loneliness.
 My dream of accepting so called 'imperfection' is in fact a a realizing of a different world view for which there's no way back. The shiny, perfect point of view is crumbling and has been for a long time. Formally, my work was called blurry, broken or even botched but they fail in the test of acceptance that all things are imperfect. It's a seismic shift for some but in this age where the cracks are no longer hidden, the affirmation of reality is still difficult. 
But that's so depressing right? To acknowledge that the dream is actually turning into a nightmare. It's easier to deny than to utter the truth of defeat. (ruin). 
That we are all finite is irrefutable but we just don't want to believe it. That's how organized religion managed to take the hold of the masses but that too is waning these days. Proving that everything has it's time, even God. 
I began expressing myself through photography before the digital age we currently inhabit and certainly predating 'instagram'. Understanding the skill of analog film which requires that conditions be right before the click of the shutter is in stark contrast to todays, post production photography.
 The celebration of imperfection reconnects us to the real world where we normally mask our flaws.
I chose Polaroid film because it portrays color like candy making even the broken an expression of endearment. The combination of the color and the blemishes of expired Polaroid analog film gave me a sense of inner peace with my surroundings. It just fit. Nothing had portrayed my vision so symbolically. Frankly, It's liberating.
The quirks, oddities or the perfectly imperfect uniqueness of my work relate to our own life blemishes and somehow make them ok or even remarkable. Honoring that value of imperfection makes it permissible to be. 
One might put the world into two camps, the ones who appreciate the beauty of imperfection and the ones who don't. Let me warn you now, those who attempt to see and are successful, can never return. To see that perspective is to have gone into a twilight zone of understanding where your former self is altered forever and the once revered is no longer possibly seen with beauty.
 
Allowing space and time for the magic moment to manifest and capturing that enchantment. 
I use my senses and current affairs to plot that path of serendipity especially when it's a mark of turbulence. The upheaval of balance is the key for chance and allows all unknown forces to contribute to the moment.
This is what it means to me.
The first rule in art is that there are no rules. 
I look inside myself, ground that emotion and imagine it in a dream. 
It's the only thing that make any sense to me.
 Dreams are the foundation of emotion and the link to our sub-conscience. The link between my work and your sub-conscience is that you're allowed to insert yourself into the story itself. 
I try to clarify my nightly dreams subjectively with a cup of nostalgia in a bowl of emotions and sprinkle it generously with sex. It is there, the fountain of our instincts. 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 dreamscapes. 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)
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