Description

Nine Trips Around the Sun is the largest and most comprehensive presentation of Carrie Schneider's photographs and films to date. Spanning the years 2006 through 2015, the 59 works offer a survey of the artist's self-described documents of something performed for the camera and demonstrate the range of lens-based processes she has employed. The exhibition includes works from her Derelict Self, Figure-Ground, Burning House, and Reading Women series, and will premiere a 16mm film and photographs from her recent Moon Drawings series and silver gelatin prints from her new Summer Drawings project. Schneider's Dance Response videos, made in collaboration with choreographer/dancer Kyle Abraham, will also be on view.

The earliest works in the exhibition are Schneider's Derelict Self photographs (2006-2007), for which the artist and her brother enacted mundane moments together bathing, napping, or wrestling—that, in childhood, evince the intimacy of sibling relationships, but, in adulthood, point to complex emotional dynamics, including the navigation of simultaneous desires for closeness and separation. Schneider created her psychologically charged Figure-Ground works (2008), which merge the artist's body and the stark natural landscape, while completing a Fulbright Fellowship in Finland, the country where her grandmother was born.

For her Burning House series (2010-2013), Schneider traveled repeatedly to northern Wisconsin, each time building a small wooden house, rowing or dragging it to a tiny island, setting it on fire, and photographing and filming it. The endurance of her action is mirrored in the fortitude of the house, which, although perpetually engulfed in flames, never seems to burn down, even as the times of day and seasons shift. For Reading Women (2011-2014), Schneider likewise set up scenarios to concurrently photograph and film, in this case repairing to the domestic interiors of her creative cohort to record 100 individual female artists, curators, writers, and musicians as they each read a book of their choosing by a female author. Schneider relates that during the course of their reading, the sitter loses awareness of the camera and any semblance of a pose, forgetting her cultural performance.

Schneider traveled to North Carolina's rural mountains and spent one month, the duration of an entire moon cycle, photographing and filming the moon for her Moon Drawings (2014-2015). She used a medium-format 6x7 camera and exposed the same twenty rolls of film on a nightly basis—sometimes rewinding and shooting again multiple times in one night—resulting in 300 unique silver gelatin prints and a 16mm film. Schneider's Summer Drawings (2015) are also unique silver gelatin prints, but their mysterious abstractions of figures, plants, and architecture were made by directly exposing photographic paper in the camera.