Items Similar to Reload! (Wastelands) View More
Stefanie SchneiderReload! (Wastelands)2003
2003
About
Reload! - I changed my mind (Wastelands), Edition 2/5 , 57x56cm, 2003
analog C-Print, hand-printed by the artist on Fuji Crystal Archive Paper,
based on an expired Polaroid, Artist inventory Number 1173.02,
mounted on Aluminum with matte UV-Protection, signed on verso.
For sale is a piece from the Wastelands series.
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 regis- tered 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 pic- tures. Happiness brimmed in that wild terrain. Maybe things were begin- ning 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 abol- ish 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 acknowl- edges 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 ele- ments, 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-ofsequence 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 am- biances 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 ex- panse occurs the processing of shards of lived experience between these blinks of an eye that comprise the pages of Wastelands. During these innumerous 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 be-
ginning 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.
Details
- Artist
- Creation Year2003
- Medium
- Movement & Style
- ConditionGood
- Period
- DimensionsH 22.45 in. x W 22.05 in. x D 0.12 in.H 57 cm x W 56 cm x D 3 mm
- Gallery LocationBerlin, DE
- Reference NumberLU65233330571
Buyer Protection Guaranteed
Our Promise To You: If you're not happy with the way an item arrived, we'll work with you and the seller to reach an optimal resolution. Read more
Shipping, Returns & Payment
- ShippingRates vary by destination and complexity
Some items may require special handling and packaging. Request a shipping quote to see what options are available to your destination.
- Return Policy
This item can be returned within 7 days of delivery.
View details
- Online Payment Methods1stdibs accepts the following payment methods
- Item InvoiceGenerate an invoice that you can customize and print.
About the Seller
5 / 5
Vetted
Platinum
1stdibs seller since 2017
Located in Berlin, DE
More From This Seller
$5,092 Sale Price
25% Off
Making Magic - The Girl behind the White Picket...
Stefanie Schneider
2010s Contemporary Color Photography
Archival Paper, Photographic Paper, C Print, Polaroid, Color
'A lonely and deserted Place'
(The Girl behind the White Picket Fence), 78x76cm,
Edition 1/5, analog C-Print, hand-printed by the artist on Fuji Archive Crystal Paper, matte surface,...
$1,584 Sale Price
30% Off
Angel Wing- Contemporary, Figurative, Polaroid,...
Stefanie Schneider
Early 2000s Contemporary Color Photography
Archival Paper, Photographic Paper, C Print, Color, Polaroid
Angel View (Memories of Green), Edition 2/5 , 58x56cm, 2003
analog C-Print, hand-printed and enlarged by the artist Stefanie Schneider on Fuji Crystal Archive Paper,
based on a Stefa...
$3,281 Sale Price
30% Off
Angel and Charlie Brown - Contemporary, Polaroi...
Stefanie Schneider
2010s Contemporary Color Photography
Photographic Paper, C Print, Polaroid, Archival Paper, Color
'Angel and Charlie Brown' (Chicks and Chicks and sometimes Cocks)
100x125 cm, digital C-Print, mounted on Aluminium with matte UV-Protection
Edition 1/10 based on an expired Polaroid...
Making Magic - The Girl behind the White Picket...
Stefanie Schneider
2010s Contemporary Color Photography
Archival Paper, Photographic Paper, C Print, Polaroid
'A lonely and deserted Place'
(The Girl behind the White Picket Fence), 78x76cm,
Edition 1/5, analog C-Print, hand-printed by the artist on Fuji Archive Crystal Paper, matte surface,...
You May Also Like
Kissing Priests (Polaroid Transfer of Embracing...
Mark Beard
1990s Contemporary Color Photography
Archival Paper, Polaroid
Kissing Priests
image size: 8 x 10 inches
Polaroid Transfer on 22 x 15 inch Rives BFK paper, unframed
signed SM Beard in pencil on bottom right corner.
ed. 5/6
This is one in a ser...
Tennessee Williams (Polaroid Transfer of Americ...
Mark Beard
1990s Contemporary Color Photography
Archival Paper, Polaroid
image size: 8 x 10 inches
Portrait of Tennessee Williams
Unique Polaroid Transfer on 22 x 15 inch Rives BFK paper, unframed
signed SM Beard in pencil on bottom right corner, unique ...
QE 1 1566
Jack Perno
21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary Color Photography
Archival Ink, Archival Paper, Inkjet, Polaroid
Archival Pigment Print
Edition of 25
Frame size: 26.5 x 23 inches
This photograph is a digital reproduction of an original 8 x 10" polaroid that was manipulated by hand.
Add...
"Letters To My Mother", One of a kind Photograp...
Juan Pablo Ballester
1990s Contemporary Color Photography
Archival Paper, Photographic Paper, Black and White, Color
Letters to My Mother
46" x 32.5"
Archival Pigment Print
1998
Framed
_________________
Juan Pablo Ballester Carmenates (born September 16, 1966 in Camagüey, Cuba) is a Cuban artist. H...
Price Upon Request
I Believe in Me
Carla Coulson
2010s Contemporary Figurative Photography
Archival Ink, Archival Paper, Photographic Paper, Color, Archival Pigment
Young Girl In Bloom
This series was inspired by that delicate age when young girls are between teenagers but not yet women. This incredible moment in life when young women are on th...
Price Upon Request
On My Way
Carla Coulson
2010s Contemporary Color Photography
Paper, Archival Ink, Archival Paper, Photographic Paper, Color, Digital,...
Young Girl In Bloom
This series was inspired by that delicate age when young girls are between teenagers but not yet women. This incredible moment in life when young women are on th...
Price Upon Request
Going Places
Carla Coulson
2010s Contemporary Figurative Photography
Archival Ink, Archival Paper, Photographic Paper, Color, Archival Pigment
Young Girl In Bloom
This series was inspired by that delicate age when young girls are between teenagers but not yet women. This incredible moment in life when young women are on th...
Price Upon Request
I Saw You Standing There
Carla Coulson
2010s Contemporary Figurative Photography
Archival Ink, Archival Paper, Photographic Paper, Color, Archival Pigment
Young Girl In Bloom
This series was inspired by that delicate age when young girls are between teenagers but not yet women. This incredible moment in life when young women are on th...
Why Shop on 1stdibs?
Only Vetted, Professional Sellers
Buyer Protection Guaranteed
Fully Insured Global Deliveries