Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles projects is pleased to present a two-person show with new works by Stefanie Schneider and Patrick Wilson. Entitled "Oil Fields", the exhibition connotes both the notion of the frontier, and a kind of horizontal understanding of landscape that is quintessentially about the west and particularly about Los Angeles. While it circumscribes the west's idiosyncratic historical and physical manifestations, it also stands for a concept that is slowly fading into the past as a new era emerges: the information age.
Situated on the verge of an elusive super-reality, Stefanie Schneider's photographic sequences provide the ambience for loosely woven story lines that play out in front of a vast western landscape. Schneider works with the chemical mutations of expired instant film stock. Strange 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 emulation of Hollywood movies reflects less a desire to dwell on nostalgic notions of the west but an intense interest in how landscape is perceived through film.
The city of Los Angeles is the point of departure for Patrick Wilson's new body of work. Transient images, urban references specific to Los Angeles, ranging from mail boxes to roof tops, high-rises, and liquor stores, are sublimated in fields of translucent color. Compared to prior work the colors of these new paintings are greatly subdued. Browns, grays, off-whites, and toxic blues are alive with the contradictory qualities that reflect the utterly unique light of Los Angeles.
Stefanie Schneider received her MFA at the Folkwang Schule, Essen, Germany. She has shown at the Kunstverein Ulm, Germany, at the Staedtische Ausstellungshalle am Hawerkamp, Muenster, Germany, at the Institut fuer Neue Medien, Frankfurt, Germany, at the Nassauischer Kunstverein, the Museum Wiesbaden, the Brotfabrik, Berlin, and the Kunststiftung Poll, Berlin, among others.
Patrick Wilson received his MFA from Claremont Graduate School, and has shown at the Riverside Art Museum, L.A. County Museum, the Long Beach Museum, Fusebox in Washington D.C., Stefan Stux Gallery and Feigen in New York, and Todd Hosfelt Gallery and Brian Gross Fine Art in San Francisco.
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