Leaving II (Sidewinder) - 2005

48x46cm each, installed 110x215cm, Edition of 10.
8 digital C-Prints based on 8 original Polaroids.
Signature label and Certificate.
Artist Inventory No. 3436.
Not mounted.

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. fetishisized 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, Kunsthaus Graz, Oct 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 at his temple. Tell me what god’s gonna do for me and you now 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 dessert night who wakes so late. Orion is a belt John Baptiste looks at through the torn-screen trailer window. There, touching his calf are vipers crawling now across her feet between his knees in front of her he kneeling for his life and they are full of venom with their broken fangs.

A gun at head, where even his breath, so short, is preaching. He’s in a wheat field. John Baptiste. Counting birds on telephone wires hung low in afternoon where his mother’s call cannot now reach him. There she stands a weeping willow with the sidewinder underneath the trailer step a drop of blood upon her ankle with the bullet through its head. A scar follows sweat palm to wrist. Torn Stevie. Scars from the weapon to her toes an accidental act of God her father said. On Vaness at California 16 years ago but who’s counting 6 bullets for the barrel wait beside the temple. The long white shaft of tissue hemmed together gods tattoo along her ribs, hip to breast. She wants to fuck the preacher in her trailer with his bible on the alter front row Stevie asks forgiveness holy father from the car that shook her bones apart. John Baptiste asks to pray before she leads his temple head.

For twenty minutes darkness hides the accidents in trailer shade her childish screams a preacher underneath her shimmer blue bled dress. The prayers he said beside the bed with mother for relatives with tumors, brand new bicycles, and rain. Stevie takes the whisky in her mouth to wash him out the sidewinder skids across her wounded foot of scars. John Baptiste asks the Lord to heal her in the new day that is breaking mouth of whisky spits it laughing father forgive the trigger finger for the viper he gives thanks.

And takes the barrel toward his lips through mumbling supplication kiss it Brother Stevie offers, please, but doesn’t wait him there. Copper penny Sunday School upon the tongue. And closed his eyes. A blur of her and mother. Other bodies. Women, gently crushing spirits. Prayers. His han under her weight in grams. The fingernail fang and fucks it. So slid the pull of metal out As god can answer. And into her mouth then. Settles. And wet the metal. He touches her, his finger. Viper like. And fuck it sore. Believers. Repentant whore forgiven preacher leaving town in that old ragtop down and left a rag dress bleeding in the Airstream soft, again. (JD Rudometkin)

“Working on Sidewinder with Stefanie Schneider was intense. It is a very personal piece for both of us, though I feel in very different ways. When overdue fears and aspirations are able to surface in a project, the work becomes a mirror. Such efforts are always a risk. I am still uncertain of what exactly to make of it Sidewinder. How much should have been exposed. What needs to remain sacred. I almost did not drive that „68 Deville” out to 29 Palms on the day we were set to shoot. I followed her out there against a feeling I had. Was it fear? I don’t know. Perhaps mistakes do not exist. What is our intuition composed of anyhow? When I look out across the desert, it seems so flat. So free of dramatic lines. That is when a human figure appears, even in the distance, a curiosity. There are so many of us clustered in these cities, who would care. Why take the time? I will always drive out of town back into parts of Sidewinder from time to time.”(JD Rudometkin)

In the case of Sidewinder the scenario was created by internet where she met J.D. Rudometkin, an ex-theologian, who agreed to her idea to live with her for five weeks in the scrubland desert
environment of Southern California. The dynamics and unfolding of their relationship, both sexually and emotionally, became the primary subject matter of this series of photographs. The relative isolation and their close proximity, the interactive tensions, conflicts and submissions, are thus recorded to reveal the day-to-day evolution of their relationship. That a time limit was set on this relation-based experiment was not the least important aspect of the project. The text and music accompanying the DVD were written by the American Rudometkin, who speaks poetically of “Torn Stevie. Scars from the weapon to her toes an accidental act of God her father said. On Vaness at California.” The mix of hip reverie and fantasy-based language of his text, echoes the chaotic unfolding of their daily life in this period, and is evident in the almost sun-bleached Polaroid images like Whiskey Dance, where the two abandon themselves to the frenetic circumstances of the moment. Thus Sidewinder, a euphemism for both a missile and a rattlesnake, hints at the libidinal and emotional dangers that were risked by Schneider and Rudometkin. Perhaps, more than any other of her photo-novels it was the most spontaneous and immediate, since Schneider’s direct participation mitigated against and narrowed down the space between her life and the art work. The explicit and direct character of their relationship at this time, opens up the question as to the biographical role Schneider plays in all her work. She both makes and directs the work while simultaneously dwelling within the artistic processes as they unfold. Hence she is both author and character, conceiving the frame within which things will take place, and yet still subject to the same unpredictable outcomes that emerge in the process.

(Mark Gisbourne, Stranger than Paradise, 2006, page 12-14)