Stefanie Schneider

Wits End (Wastelands) - Contemporary, Analog, Polaroid, Color

2003

After (Wastelands) - 2003 20x20cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the original Polaroid. Artist inventory Number 18799. Signature label and Certi...

Without You (Wastelands) - 2003 20x20cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the original Polaroid. Artist inventory Number 934. Signature label and Certificate. Not mounted. 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 registered no seismic activity. Dustbowl 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 storyline, 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 conceivably 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...

Listing is for UNFRAMED print. Inquire within for framing. Edition of 22. If the exhibition piece is sold or the customer orders a different print size, the photograph is produced upon purchase. Please allow two weeks for production. Shipping time depends on method of shipping. Price is subject to availability. The Robin Rice Gallery reserves the right to adjust this price depending on the current edition of the photograph. ABOUT: Victoria Goldman’s twenty-year-long fascination with Tarot has created a series of photographs based on the imagery and the mythology behind the ancient Tarot cards. Each image in the collection is inspired by and named after one of the 22 major archetypes of the Tarot. While photographing and teaching yoga and meditation in India, Hawaii, and throughout Europe, Goldman always made sure to carry a Tarot deck in her backpack. She views Tarot as a tool for personal elevation, helping her direct her focus and better understand her psyche. The collection’s soft focus and figurative emphasis is reminiscent of the work of Francesca Woodman or Julia Margaret Cameron, whom Goldman cites as personal artistic inspirations. The concept behind the exhibition was long thought-out; while some pieces date as recently as two months prior to the exhibition opening, others date as far back as 1999 or 2000. Shot primarily with vintage Polaroid and film with a twin lens Rolleiflex camera, the dark, moody, mythological images recall a classical tone that mirrors the timelessness of the cards themselves. The invitational image, entitled “Wheel of Fortune”, depicts a young woman in a glittering gown, her backside facing the viewer and her body positioned to spin a large carnival wheel hidden in the darkness of the photograph. The high-contrast nature of the image abstracts the gown, morphing the glitter on the dress into drops of light that shine through the dark air. The slender young woman in “Fortune” can be found in several of the collection’s photographs, depicting not just Lady Luck, as in the invitational image, but also the Emperor, the Devil...

This is from a show at Sidney Janis Gallery and is from the estate of Joan Sonnabend. Eve Sonneman (born in Chicago on 1946) is an American photographer and artist. She did a series ...