Day Worker (American Depression) - 1999

Edition 3/10,
66x60cm with white 'Polaroid Frame'.
Analog C-Print, hand-printed by the artist, on Crystal Fuji Archive Paper, based on a Polaroid.
Mounted on Aluminum with matte UV-Protection.
Artist inventory Number 282.03.
Signed on verso.

A German view of the American West

The works of Stefanie Schneider evoke Ed Ruscha's obsession with the American experience, the richness of Georgia O'Keefe's deserts, and the loneliness of Edward Hopper's haunting paintings. So how exactly did this German photographer become one of the most important artists of the American narrative of the 20th and 21st century?

This theme of preservation and deterioration is a core part of Schneider's oeuvre. In an interview in October 2014 with Artnet, the artist explained how her own experiences of pain and loss inspire her. ''My work resembles my life: Love, lost and unrequited, leaves its mark in our lives as a senseless pain that has no place in the present.''

Schneider's subjects are often featured in apocalyptic settings: desert planes, trailer parks, oilfields, run-down motels and empty beaches, alone, or if not, not connected with one another. ''It is the tangible experience of ''absence'' that has inspired my work,'' explained Schneider.

Stefanie Schneider was born and raised in Cuxhaven, Germany but lives and works in Southern California. Exploring the American dream and capturing it with Polaroid instant film. Situated on the verge of an elusive super-reality, her photographic sequences provide the ambiance for loosely woven storylines and a cast of phantasmic characters that reflect a part of the narrator's life told from her perspective. Often about love, communication. sexuality and relationships. Schneider works with the chemical mutations of expired polaroid film stock. Chemical explosions of color spreading across the surfaces undermine the photograph's commitment to reality and induce her characters into trance-like dreamscapes. Like flickering sequences of old road movies, Schneider's images seem to evaporate before conclusions can be made - their ephemeral reality manifesting in subtle gestures and mysterious motives. Schneider's images refuse to succumb to reality, they keep alive the confusions of dream, desire, fact, and fiction yet they also explore the relationship between the medium and the viewer. The wabi-sabi 'ness' of Schneider's work can not be denied or ignored. It's a step of acceptance of 'flaws', gaps, and distortions. Missing pieces of the puzzle. The artist flaunts, uses, and exposes the unknown using expired Polaroid instant film intentionally. Presents it. What you do with that is up to you. That missing part of the picture is for you to include yourself, you fill it in with yourself. That might be critical that it's there at all, missing and missing the entire point altogether or by filling in the unknown with their own imagination. Even their own memories which then integrates the viewer and artist as one with limitless potential.

(Barnebys UK, May 3, 2017)