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Stefanie Schneider
Untitled (Traintracks) - based on a Polaroid

2004

About the Item

Untitled (Traintracks) - The last Picture Show - 2004, 38x37cm. Edition of 5, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Signature label and Certificate. Artist Inventory No. 1053. Not mounted. Stefanie Schneider: The Dream Fades, but the Echo Remains Some artists document the world as it is; Stefanie Schneider exposes the fractures beneath its surface. Her work is more than just a vision—it is a haunting afterimage of what once was and what can never be again. Through the alchemy of expired Polaroid film, she captures the slow unraveling of a dream, where chemistry and time conspire to erode both memory and myth. Schneider's images emerge like relics from a fading civilization, their colors melting, their edges dissolving—just as the ideals they depict have begun to decay. The California she portrays is not the land of promise but its aftershock, a landscape littered with the ghosts of broken dreams. Her figures, frozen in golden-hour limbo, wander through the remnants of the American Dream, their beauty tinged with the melancholy of something already lost. The film itself—fragile, unpredictable, vanishing before our eyes—mirrors the disintegration of a culture that once believed in its own immortality. There was a time when America sold the world an image of perfection: the open road, the Hollywood starlet, the neon glow of a roadside motel promising escape. But look closer, and you see the cracks. The highways lead nowhere, the stars flicker and fade, and the neon lights buzz with the exhaustion of something long past its prime. Schneider does not create nostalgia; she exposes its ghosts, revealing not just the beauty of a dream but the ache of its collapse. Her work is an elegy—not just for Polaroid, but for a world that once believed in its own myths. The same way her film corrodes, so too does the illusion of endless possibility, the idea that time stands still for those who refuse to wake up. And yet, in the ruin, there is poetry. In the imperfection, there is truth. In the fading light, there is still something worth remembering. Some artists preserve history. Stefanie Schneider captures its decay—not with cynicism, but with the quiet grace of someone who understands that even as the dream collapses, its echoes will linger, soft and radiant, like dust illuminated by desert light.

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Blue Sky Palm Trees (Sidewinder) - 2005 80x80cm, Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on a Polaroid. Signature label and Certificate. Artist Inventory No. 3026. Not mounted. Exhibitions for this piece: 2008 Sidewinder / 29 Palms, CA, c.art-Galerie, Dornbirn, Austria (S), Sidewinder, Galerie Robert Drees, Hannover, Germany (S), Sidewinder, Galerie Thierry Librati, Paris, France (S), Sidewinder, Städtische Galerie am Mozartplatz, Salzburg, Austria (S) ("Frenzy", Poster Image Salzburger Festspiele // 2007 Sidewinder, Scalo Guye, Los Angeles, USA (S), the gallery is now located in Zurich // 2006 Sidewinder, Artwalk Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands, curated by Frans Oomen (G) publications of this piece: STRANGER THAN PARADISE published by Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2006 (monograph) // movie: 2005 SIDEWINDER - Director / Artist / Camera / Editing - starring JD Rudometkin, Stefanie Schneider, music by JD Rudometkin
 "private history turned into an intimate mythology of elemental fantasies where reality is perceived through a veil of psychedelic memories and unconscious projections. such is a collection of passions and dreams, an uncanny diary of ephemeral narratives and mental intensities in Stefanie Schneider’s painterly photographs where subjectivity of an ontological doubt uses a poetics of pastische as a vehicle for an intertextual journey towards the truth and the authenticity of primary emotions. here time is immersed in a nostalgic suspense of oneiric dimension, a sort of ambiguous coma of silence and comfort, and open space embraces a psychotic landscape of solitude and accidental pleasure. fetishized surface of extreme feelings gives a stage for an unsolicited promise of unconditional love and unlimited freedom, a promise framed by sensual tension between fulfillment and expectation." Adam Budak, Kusthaus Graz, 2005 Sidewinder
 There’s blood on the dress that hangs in the Airstream trailer outside 29 palms. With the pistol in her sweat palm touching his temple. Tell me what god’s gonna do for me and you know Stevie’s saying while Brother John Baptiste looks there across to where her cat seems weak and fed. All the good that comes to me from my believing man, I wanna hear about it said to me like that. Just the way you breathed it like you did 10 minutes ago when I was wrapped so well around your head. Silence then. A baby screams his mother out in the desert night...
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