Contemporary Art

Love Scene against the Wall - part 3 (Sidewinder) - 2007, 40x39cm, Edition 3/10. Archival C-Print, based on the original Polaroid. Certificate and Signature label. Artist Inven...

He She Says (Stage of Consciousness) - 2007 40x48cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and signature label. Artist Invento...

Oleander (Life on Mars) - 2024 40x48m, Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and Signature label. Artist Inventory No. 22135....

Oleander (Life on Mars) - 2024 40x48m, Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and Signature label. Artist Inventory No. 22312....

Untitled (Fairytales) - 2006, 49x48cm, Edition 1/10. Archival C-Print, based on the original Polaroid. Certificate and signature label. Artist Inventory # 20424.01. Not mounted...

Love Scene against the Wall - Sidewinder) - 2005, Edition 1/10. 100x320cm with white frame, each image is 70x69cm in size. Giclee Print on Canson Platine Fibre Rag Paper, base...

Fly me to the Moon (Till Death do us Part) - 2005 50x49cm, Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and Signature label. Artist ...

The Dance (Stage of Consciousness) - 2007 40x48cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and signature label. Artist Inventory...

Forevermore (Till Death do us Part) - 2005 58x50cm, Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and Signature label. Artist Invento...

Indian Summer III (The Last Picture Show) - 2005 Edition 1/5 128x126cm. Analog C-Print, matte surface, hand-printed by the artist, based on the original Polaroid. Signature label ...

The Drawing Room (Stage of Consciousness) - 2007 40x48cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and signature label. Artist In...

Every Single Incident Weighs Tons (The Girl Behind the White Picket Fence) - 2013 90x89cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Certificat...

Someday Soon (Stage of Consciousness) - 2007 90x89cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and signature label. Artist Invent...

Abracadabra (Chicks and Chicks and Sometimes Cocks) - 2019 20x20cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and signature label. ...

The Princess and her Lover (29 Palms, CA) - 2009 120x180cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on 15 original Polaroids. Certificate and Signature label....

Four Corners (The Last Picture Show) - 2005 Edition 1/5, 38x37cm each, 38x208cm installed including gaps. 5 Analog C-Prints, hand-printed by the artist on Archive Fuji Chrystal Pa...

Collage (Chicks and Chicks and Sometimes Cocks) - 2019 20x20cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and signature label. Art...

Change Character (Stage of Consciousness) - 2007 40x48cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and signature label. Artist In...

The Pink Dress (Stage of Consciousness) - 2007 40x48cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and signature label. Artist Inve...

A Million Dead End Streets (Stage of Consciousness) - 2007 40x40cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and signature label. ...

Dusty and Susanna (Chicks and Chicks and sometimes Cocks) - 2019 50x49cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Signature label and Certifi...

Dreamgirl (Chicks and Chicks and Sometimes Cocks) - 2019 20x24cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and signature label. A...

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes (Stage of Consciousness) - 2007 40x48cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and signature label. Artist...

Love you Actor Girl (Stage of Consciousness) - 2007 40x48cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and signature label. Artist...

I can't trace Time (Stage of Consciousness) - 2007 40x48cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and signature label. Artist ...

Desert Living (California Dreaming) - 2017 20x24cm, Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and Signature label. Artist Invento...

Any Way the Wind blows (Stage of Consciousness) - 2007 40x50cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and signature label. Art...

Psychadelic (Stage of Consciousness) - 2007 40x48cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and signature label. Artist Invento...

Deserted (Stage of Consciousness) - 2007 40x48cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and signature label. Artist Inventory ...

Desert Living (California Dreaming) - 2017 40x48m, Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and Signature label. Artist Inventor...

Desert Living (California Dreaming) - 2017 40x48cm, Edition of 10, plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and Signature label. Artist Invento...

Small Breasts (Strange Love) - 2003, Edition 1/5, 60x80cm each, installed with gaps 127x80cm, 2 Analog C-Prints, hand-printed by the artist, printed on Fuji Archive Paper, based ...

Lucid Dreams (Stage of Consciousness) - 2007 20x24cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and signature label. Artist Invent...

29 Palms, CA - Self Portrait (29 Palms, CA) - 1997 Edition 2/5, 50x60cm including white border, Image size: 59x44cm, analog C-Print, hand-printed by the artist, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and Signature label. Artist Inventory No. 123. Not mounted. The artist Stefanie Schneider has produced a unique body of work because she was the first to utilize expired Polaroid instant photography in fine art. Embracing the ‘imperfections’ this medium can produce Stefanie’s artwork was the inspiration of Instagram and the catalyst that motivated Dr. Florian Kaps to rescue the sole remaining Polaroid film production factory in Holland. Saving the last production equipment just before their planned destruction, therefore saving millions of vintage Polaroid cameras from obsolescence. How's that for an artist affecting her medium of choice? The ‘Impossible film project’ saved the production factory and then a Polish businessman bought ‘Impossible film’ and the actual Polaroid company to bring the two back together resulting in the so-called ‘Polaroid Originals’ and giving it to his millennial son. (I hear he might also get Fuji film company for Christmas) Stefanie Schneider purchases Polaroid instant film and uses it only at it’s best possible outcome for her planned film shoots. The location, sets, costumes, actors and stories all come from Schneider but that’s just the beginning. The stories and their production take place in the high desert near Joshua Tree in California but the post-production is in Berlin, Germany. The chosen photographs are rephotographed to make a negative. Following with the analog medium, Schneider enlarges and prints old school in a self-designed and built analog darkroom in an old factory studio in Berlin. The largest of her hand-printed artworks measure 125cm or 49 inches in width with her vintage ‘Colenta’ developing machine. Schneider designed and built her enlarger to properly fit her concept with the biggest ‘Durst’ enlarger ever built and turned on its side to print even bigger than was possible in its original design and rolls on custom tracks. Schneider created a film production movie set for her biggest film concepts from all her proceeds on an organic (off-grid) farm in California where she eats only what she grows. Complete with a garden, greenhouse, and chicken coop. (It’s also a sanctuary for animals as no meat consumption is permitted) Vintage travel trailers dot the farm where production ideas develop. a costume trailer, film storage in the vintage refrigerators stuffed with original Polaroid film packs. Schneider’s feature film ‘The Girl Behind the White Picket Fence” took 5 years to shoot at the production ranch and used over 4500 Polaroid photographs shown consecutively with voice and music. Other films include; ‘Sidewinder’ - a love story ‘Till death do us part’ - a love story ‘Instant Dreams’- a documentary Stefanie is featured in Schneider’s artwork is on music album covers for Cyndi Lauper and the Red Hot Chile Peppers and hangs in Anthony Kiedis...

Spheres (Chicks and Chicks and Sometimes Cocks) - 2019 20x20cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and signature label. Art...

Living by Voices we shall never hear (Chicks and Chicks and Sometimes Cocks) - 2019 20x20cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Certific...

Dusk (The Last Picture Show) - 2005 Edition 4/5, 38x36cm each, 131x127cm installed including gaps. 9 Analog C-PrintS, hand-printed by the artist on Archive Fuji Chrystal Paper, base...

Big Boy (Chicks and Chicks and Sometimes Cocks) - 2019 20x24cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and signature label. Art...

Free Range (Chicks and Chicks and Sometimes Cocks) - 2019 20x20cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and signature label. ...

Black Bird (Chicks and Chicks and Sometimes Cocks) - 2019 20x20cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and signature label. ...

Magic Hour (Musica Poetica) - 1999 Edition 3/10, 44x59cm. Analog C-Print, hand-printed and enlarged by the artist, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and Signature label. Artist...

Never Let Go (Chicks and Chicks and Sometimes Cocks) - 2007 20x20cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and signature label....

Male Nude VI (29 Palms, CA) - 1999 20x20cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print based on the Polaroid. Certificate and signature label. Artist inventory number...

On the Road (The Last Picture Show) - 1999 44x75cm including the white frame, image areas: 30x29cm each. Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the 2 ori...

Untitled (The Last Picture Show), 2005 38x36cm, Edition 2/5. Analog C-Print, hand-printed by the artist on Fuji Crystal Archive Paper, based on the original SX-70 Polaroid. Inventory No. 781.02. Signature label and Certificate. Not mounted. LIFE’S A DREAM (The Personal World of Stefanie Schneider) by Mark Gisbourne Projection is a form of apparition that is characteristic of our human nature, for what we imagine almost invariably transcends the reality of what we live. And, an apparition, as the word suggests, is quite literally ‘an appearing’, for what we appear to imagine is largely shaped by the imagination of its appearance. If this sounds tautological then so be it. But the work of Stefanie Schneider is almost invariably about chance and apparition. And, it is through the means of photography, the most apparitional of image-based media, that her pictorial narratives or photo-novels are generated. Indeed, traditional photography (as distinct from new digital technology) is literally an ‘awaiting’ for an appearance to take place, in line with the imagined image as executed in the camera and later developed in the dark room. The fact that Schneider uses out-of-date Polaroid film stock to take her pictures only intensifies the sense of their apparitional contents when they are realised. The stability comes only at such time when the images are re-shot and developed in the studio, and thereby fixed or arrested temporarily in space and time. The unpredictable and at times unstable film she adopts for her works also creates a sense of chance within the outcome that can be imagined or potentially envisaged by the artist Schneider. But this chance manifestation is a loosely controlled, or, better called existential sense of chance, which becomes pre-disposed by the immediate circumstances of her life and the project she is undertaking at the time. Hence the choices she makes are largely open-ended choices, driven by a personal nature and disposition allowing for a second appearing of things whose eventual outcome remains undefined. And, it is the alliance of the chance-directed material apparition of Polaroid film, in turn explicitly allied to the experiences of her personal life circumstances, that provokes the potential to create Stefanie Schneider’s open-ended narratives. Therefore they are stories based on a degenerate set of conditions that are both material and human, with an inherent pessimism and a feeling for the sense of sublime ridicule being seemingly exposed. This in turn echoes and doubles the meaning of the verb ‘to expose’. To expose being embedded in the technical photographic process, just as much as it is in the narrative contents of Schneider’s photo-novel exposés. The former being the unstable point of departure, and the latter being the uncertain ends or meanings that are generated through the photographs doubled exposure. The large number of speculative theories of apparition, literally read as that which appears, and/or creative visions in filmmaking and photography are self-evident, and need not detain us here. But from the earliest inception of photography artists have been concerned with manipulated and/or chance effects, be they directed towards deceiving the viewer, or the alchemical investigations pursued by someone like Sigmar Polke. None of these are the real concern of the artist-photographer Stefanie Schneider, however, but rather she is more interested with what the chance-directed appearances in her photographs portend. For Schneider’s works are concerned with the opaque and porous contents of human relations and events, the material means are largely the mechanism to achieving and exposing the ‘ridiculous sublime’ that has come increasingly to dominate the contemporary affect(s) of our world. The uncertain conditions of today’s struggles as people attempt to relate to each other - and to themselves - are made manifest throughout her work. And, that she does this against the backdrop of the so-called ‘American Dream’, of a purportedly advanced culture that is Modern America, makes them all the more incisive and critical as acts of photographic exposure. From her earliest works of the late nineties one might be inclined to see her photographs as if they were a concerted attempt at an investigative or analytic serialisation, or, better still, a psychoanalytic dissection of the different and particular genres of American subculture. But this is to miss the point for the series though they have dates and subsequent publications remain in a certain sense unfinished. Schneider’s work has little or nothing to do with reportage as such, but with recording human culture in a state of fragmentation and slippage. And, if a photographer like Diane Arbus dealt specifically with the anomalous and peculiar that made up American suburban life, the work of Schneider touches upon the alienation of the commonplace. That is to say how the banal stereotypes of Western Americana have been emptied out, and claims as to any inherent meaning they formerly possessed has become strangely displaced. Her photographs constantly fathom the familiar, often closely connected to traditional American film genre, and make it completely unfamiliar. Of course Freud would have called this simply the unheimlich or uncanny. But here again Schneider almost never plays the role of the psychologist, or, for that matter, seeks to impart any specific meanings to the photographic contents of her images. The works possess an edited behavioural narrative (she has made choices), but there is never a sense of there being a clearly defined story. Indeed, the uncertainty of my reading here presented, acts as a caveat to the very condition that Schneider’s photographs provoke. Invariably the settings of her pictorial narratives are the South West of the United States, most often the desert and its periphery in Southern California. The desert is a not easily identifiable space, with the suburban boundaries where habitation meets the desert even more so. There are certain sub-themes common to Schneider’s work, not least that of journeying, on the road, a feeling of wandering and itinerancy, or simply aimlessness. Alongside this subsidiary structural characters continually appear, the gas station, the automobile, the motel, the highway, the revolver, logos and signage, the wasteland...

Precious (Chicks and Chicks and Sometimes Cocks) - 2019 20x20cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and signature label. Ar...

Tenderness (Chicks and Chicks and sometimes Cocks) - 2019 20x24cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and signature label. ...

Three Girls II (The Last Picture Show) - 2006, 50x49cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the original Polaroid. Certificate and Signature label. ...

Tomorrow (The Last Picture Show) - 2000 50x49cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the original Polaroid. Artist inventory number: 2750. Signature l...

A Rainy Day (The Last Picture Show) - 2006, 20x20cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the original Polaroid. Certificate and Signature label. Art...

A Rainy Day (The Last Picture Show) - 2006, 20x20cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the original Polaroid. Certificate and Signature label. Art...

Interlude (Stage of Consciousness) - 2007 20x24cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the Polaroid. Certificate and signature label. Artist Inventory # 7972. Not mounted. Stefanie Schneider received her MFA in Communication Design at the Folkwang Schule Essen...

Fall (The Last Picture Show) - 2006, 50x49cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the original Polaroid. Certificate and Signature label. Artist Inv...

A Mirage (The Last Picture Show) - 2006, 50x49cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the original Polaroid. Certificate and Signature label. Artist...

Lone Pine Dreaming (The Last Picture Show) - diptych - 2005 Edition 1/5, 58x57cm each, 58x119 installed. 2 Analog C-Prints, hand-printed by the artist on Archive Fuji Chrystal Pap...

On the Way to Big Sur (The Last Picture Show) - 2000 50x49cm, Edition of 10 plus 2 Artist Proofs. Archival C-Print, based on the original Polaroid. Artist inventory number: 969. ...

Mojave Airfields (The Last Picture Show) - 2005 - 128x126cm, Edition 3/5. Analog C-Print, hand-printed by the artist, based on the original Polaroid. Artist Inventory No. 695.03...

Guadalupe (The Last Picture Show) - 2005 38x37cm, Edition 2/5. Analog C-Print, hand-printed by the artist on Archive Fuji Crystal Paper, based on the Polaroid. Artist inventory...