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Stefanie SchneiderMen at Work (California Badlands)2016
2016
About the Item
'Men at Work' (California Badlands) - 2016
20x24cm,
Edition of 10,
Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid,
Certificate and Signature label, artist Inventory No. 19407.08,
Not mounted.
Stefanie Schneider's 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.
A German view of the American West
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?
This theme of preservation and deterioration is a core part of Schneider's oeuvre. In an interview in October 2014 with Artnet, the artist explained how her own experiences of pain and loss inspire her. ''My work resembles my life: Love, lost and unrequited, leaves its mark in our lives as a senseless pain that has no place in the present.'' The first to use expired Polaroid film as their medium and in doing so inspired the resurrection of Polaroid film itself. Saving the last production line in the world from it's impending destruction in 2008.
Schneider's subjects are often featured in apocalyptic settings: desert planes, trailer parks, oilfields, run-down motels and empty beaches, alone, or if not, not connected with one another. ''It is the tangible experience of ''absence'' that has inspired my work,'' explained Schneider.
(Barnebys UK, May 3, 2017
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, Bombay Beach Biennale 2018.
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.
(translated from German by Michael Robinson)
- Creator:Stefanie Schneider (1968, German)
- Creation Year:2016
- Dimensions:Height: 7.88 in (20 cm)Width: 9.45 in (24 cm)Depth: 0.04 in (1 mm)
- Medium:
- Movement & Style:
- Period:
- Condition:
- Gallery Location:Morongo Valley, CA
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU652312154942
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