NEW YORK, NY.- For the fourth edition of OFFSCREEN Paris, the gallery will present the work of artist Carrie Schneider. Her practice emerges out of a 25-year investigation of chromogenic photo paper, and considers the feminine face as a contested site. Rooted deeply in feminist image practices, Schneider works across photography, film, and installation to challenge our inherent assumptions of image—the beauty, the form, and the terror that they can hold.
Schneider’s photographic installations are part of an ongoing series in which the artist employs a room-sized camera to create large-scale continuous prints that are then rippled in billowing folds. Long rolls of light-sensitive paper become the surface for performing transferential relationships between the relentlessly pictured women in the works. In this case, the face of actress Romy Schneider is repeated ad infinitum, taken from a scene in the 1975 film L'Important c'est d'aimer where she asks not to be photographed.
In her moving image work I don't know her, one hundred and sixty-three individual unique chromogenic photographs made by the artist are transmuted back to filmic rate through 16mm projection. Another act of refusal takes place— Mariah Carey coyly declines to give an answer to a reporter asking for opinion on another female celebrity, instead shaking her head, smiling, and proclaiming "I don't know her". The 16mm film, played on loop, is accompanied by optical sound by the composer Cecilia Lopez.
In a conversation with Laura Mulvey for Schneider’s 2023 exhibition at MassMoCA, Mulvey deemed the artist's work a crucial framework for understanding “contemporary discussions of intermediality, and its relation to media temporalities”. Schneider’s practice utilizes the regurgitative quality of image-making—not only in its rephotographing of existing pictures, but in her own artworks becoming objects for self-appropriation.
Carrie Schneider (b. 1979, Chicago, IL) lives and works between Brooklyn and Hudson, New York. Selected solo exhibitions include MassMoCA, North Adams (2023); Pérez Art Museum, Miami (2017); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2009); and Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki, Finland (2009). Selected group exhibitions include Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago (2019); Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville (2018); Changjiang Museum of Contemporary Art, Chongqing, China (2017); and The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (2015). Her works are held in collections including The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; The Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis; amongst others. She was awarded the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2024.
