Jordan (Wastelands) - Contemporary, 21st Century, Polaroid, Figurative

View Similar Items

Stefanie Schneider - Guadalupe (The Last Picture Show) - mounted, analog, Polaroid, Contemporary

Stefanie Schneider - Gasstation at Night (Stranger than Paradise) - 4 pieces, analog, mounted

Stefanie Schneider - Mojave Airfields (The Last Picture Show) - analog, mounted, vintage, plane

Stefanie Schneider - Oilfields, diptych - 21 Century, Polaroid, Contemporary, Portrait, Landscape

Stefanie Schneider - Oasis (Sidewinder) - analog, mounted

Stefanie Schneider - Traces (Stranger than Paradise) - analog, Polaroid, Contemporary

Stefanie Schneider - Mountain Ridge (Stranger than Paradise) - analog, vintage. mounted

Stefanie Schneider - Running with Guns (Long Way Home) analog, last Edition

Stefanie Schneider - A Vision you can't Capture - 29 Palms, CA, analog, mounted

Stefanie Schneider - Mojave Airfields (The Last Picture Show) - analog, mounted, vintage, plane

Stefanie Schneider - Indian Summer II (The Last Picture Show) - analog, 128x126cm, mounted

Stefanie Schneider - A Vision you can't Capture no 02 (29 Palms, CA) - 125x172cm

Want more images or videos?

Request additional images or videos from the seller

1 of 5

Stefanie Schneider
Jordan (Wastelands) - Contemporary, 21st Century, Polaroid, Figurative
2003

Name: Jordan (Wastelands) - Contemporary, 21st Century, Polaroid, Figurative
Brand: Stefanie Schneider
Rating: 4.9 (36 reviews)

About the Item

Jordan (Wastelands) - 2003 Edition of 10, 38x36cm, Archival C-Print, based on a Polaroid. Artist inventory Number 1176.13. Signature label and Certificate. Not mounted. 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 registered 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 pictures. Happiness brimmed in that wild terrain. Maybe things were beginning 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 abolish 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 acknowledges 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 elements, 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-of sequence 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 ambiances 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 expanse occurs the processing of shards of lived experience between these blinks of an eye that comprise the pages of Wastelands. During these in-numerous 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 beginning 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. Stefanie Schneider was born and raised in Cuxhaven, 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 integrats 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 distils auratically 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 openess 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 strangley alienated form: she shows stills with phases of fluttering violently in the wind, even torn in some cases, and the poor film stock emphazises the fragility of the icon even more. FlashART - Sabine Dorothee Lehner (translated from German by Michael Robinson)

Creator:
Stefanie Schneider (1968, German)
Creation Year:
2003
Dimensions:
Height: 14.97 in (38 cm)Width: 14.18 in (36 cm)Depth: 0.04 in (1 mm)
Medium:
Metal,Archival Paper,Photographic Paper,C Print,Polaroid
Movement & Style:
Contemporary
Period:
2000-2009
Condition:
Gallery Location:
Morongo Valley, CA
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU65238807922

Metal

New York III - Framed Contemporary Original Polaroid Photograph Like much of Pia Clodi's work, 'New York II' leaves a trace of the fast, nomadic life she leads, this time doucment...

Category

2010s Contemporary Landscape Photography

Materials

Archival Paper, Photographic Paper, Polaroid

Pia Clodi
New York III - Contemporary Landscape Polaroid Original Photograph Framed

$539 Sale Price

20% Off

Jordan (Wastelands) - Contemporary, 21st Century, Polaroid, Figurative

View Similar Items

Stefanie Schneider
Jordan (Wastelands) - Contemporary, 21st Century, Polaroid, Figurative
2003

About the Item