Stefanie Schneider - suburbia

Photography

Opening: October 23, 2004, 7pm
Exhibition from October 26 to November 27, 2004
Tue-Sat 12 -7pm

Sunday in suburbia, a summer's day heavy with heat, hardly a soul to be seen. As a result, the motifs of Stefanie Schneider's “Suburbia” cycle – put together in California, in the very west of the USA – are virtually inconspicuous.Schneider's camera encircles an idyllic American setting, capturing a garden practically empty of people. Surrounded by a white picket fence, flowers and trees bloom profusely in the blazing sunlight. The day is empty and quiet like only a Sunday can be. The grass is perfectly cut, the garden well tended, the inhabitants oblivious to everything and lethargic. An instant is seized, revealing the tragedy of an average, unsuccessful, middle class life.
The scene is familiar from countless movies and American literature; the perfect façade of an American ideal, which seems to conceal the horror of daily life. In David Lynch's „Blue Velvet“ the film begins with the camera rolling over a similar setting: the view over the fence, the painstakingly neatly cut lawn, ending with a close-up: a cut-off ear covered with feasting ants.
Stefanie Schneider overdoes it, she exaggerates: this is confirmed by the irritating colourfulness as well as the vehemence of the motifs. Emptiness stands in stark contrast to the beauty of the blooming roses or the lush growth of the trees. The fenced, idyllic summer scene appears vacant; unused chairs surround a table, the grill untouched and clean, no object out of place. It is only the inhabitants who appear curiously lost. Schneider shows them in the middle of their saturated lives, in well-tended averageness, which can only be endured with a Martini on ice, on hand before lunch. In her opinion the scenes are banal, yet one becomes witness to great intimacy.
Schneider's „Suburbia“ cycle lives from the interplay of the motifs, and tells a story with the same flavour as American author Raymond Carver. In general, her figures seem to have lost all faith in themselves, and to attempt to exist within an ideal where they do not feel at home.
While Schneider uses light and colour to express luxuriance, at the end of the day, her motifs hint at a life devoid of all chance of escape.
A 30 copy edition of one of Stefanie Schneider's photographs will appear in time for the exhibition.