Wendi Schneider: States of Grace
Photography begins with light. My work asks what happens when light doesn’t simply make the image, but continues to remake it.
Beginning with photography, but moving deliberately beyond the photographic image, I photograph what I feel as much as what I see, using colour, texture, translucent materials and precious metals to move between the observed and imagined.
Printed on vellum or kozo and gilded by hand on the verso, the works change in response to ambient light and the viewer’s position. The transcendance I find in sinuous organic forms is my starting point, but the work is ultimately concerned with beauty, vulnerability and impermanence — and with the possibility of making a still image feel momentarily alive.

“Schneider shoots with the ghosts of Brigman, Steichen, Stieglitz, and other members of the Photo Secession standing by her side, lending her work a timeless, beguiling air of memory. For Schneider, time itself is her demeanor . . . Building a bridge into this digital age, Schneider unabashedly flaunts her camera vision, informing it with a printmaker’s devices and a painter’s disregard for rules.” –– Rick Wester
