Daisy and Austen in front of Trailer (Till Death do us Part) - 2005
Proof b4 Printing / 128x125cm
signed, analog C-Print, hand-printed by the artist, based on a Polaroid,
signed on front.
What exactly is a proof before printing?
The proofs are part of the printing process. They are usually the few last color trials before printing the edition. They are usually not perfectly color corrected yet. Sometimes a proof might be close in color but we still have to re-print to bring everything together. Proofs are by definition imperfect and part of the natural evolution of a print. Sometimes there is no white border or a kink. A proof is a proof of one step on the way to making a print edition.They are by definition, imperfect. Wabi Sabi.
This print is very close to the final print.
“I never remember the details of a Stefanie Schneider image, just the whole. She treads a third path between reality and dream that connects the two and truly sparks my artistic, visual freedom.” (Marc Forster)
"Till death do us part" (the film) an episode of the 29 Palms, CA project. A film shot using only Polaroid stills combined with Super 8 film sequences.
Till Death Do Us Part is the story of two young lovers, lonely souls escaping the abuse of reality into each other. Imagine a stranger suddenly in your path, you can just be silent with, and you feel you have known her forever. This is the experience of Cristal and Margarita, that begins when Cristal picks her up hitchhiking on a lonely dessert road. A runaway from a cruel older brother and a broken family, Margarita is searching on the edge of the shadows for a home. Cristal was also a lonely child and already dangerously close to vanishing when she finds Margarita. For her it is the begging of life. When she finds Margarita, she finds herself, she feels for the first time and discovers that she is not invisible after all.
The childlike, roadside life they make together is a dream that they truly believe will last forever, and with the naive joy of beginners, they dive in, never sensing danger. When two lost souls become one and share everything, do they loose themselves further or do they become whole at last? When a girl has no home, no anchor, can she combine thrive with another? Once a human heart wakes up from isolation for the first time, enchanted by a reflection in love's mirror, can the dreamer fall asleep again, or must she wander searching to find it again forever?
An artistic triumph for Schneider, this piece floats deeper into her exploration of the colors of the human psyche, separation, relationship, androgyny and the fringes of social reality.
The Californian desert light and the vintage colors of Polaroid create a unforgettable atmosphere in the abandoned trailer park.
Austen Tate gives Margarita her voice in poetry and Daisy McCrackin gives Cristal her sound in music.
Stefanie Schneider born in Northern Germany but lives and works in the High Desert of Southern California where her scintillating situations take place in the American West. 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.
Schneider works with the chemical mutations of expired Polaroid film stock and embraces them. 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.
Stefanie Schneider received her MFA in Communication Design at the Folkwang Schule Essen, Germany. Her work has been shown at the Museum for Photography, Braunschweig, Museum für Kommunikation, Berlin, the Institut für Neue Medien, Frankfurt, the Nassauischer Kunstverein, Wiesbaden, Kunstverein Bielefeld, Museum für Moderne Kunst Passau, Les Rencontres d'Arles, Foto -Triennale Esslingen.