Artist: Bastienne Schmidt
Title: The Red Dress
Year created: 2008
Medium: Artist Proof c Print
Height: 16"x Width: 20"
This piece is unframed
Signed by the artist
The home is often the perfect stage for domestic bliss and self observation. The artist, Bastienne Schmidt, challenges this domestic utopia in her new conceptual series ‘Home Stills’ in which she photographs herself as a stand in in the role of a ‘Housewife’. Schmidt gives a visual interpretation of Virginia Woolf’s idea of ‘a room of one’s own’. She follows Highway 27 on Long Island, from Patchogue to Easthampton, recreating her interiors from cheap motel rooms to upscale Hampton’s mansions as imaginary rooms of her own. The sense of quiet meditation reminds one of Vermeer’s interiors and the melancholy and empty spaces of Edward Hopper. There is an element of an escapist and sometimes ironic fantasy looming in these women’s heads. At the end of these imaginary stories there is always a car close by, that one could hop in and drive away. With cut out colorful silhouettes, Schmidt depicts in her often large scale drawings different stages in a woman’s life: The innocent and curious girl such as Dorothy in the ‘Wizard of Oz’, the Venus of Botticelli, the Pinup Girl from the magazines, and the mother cradling her baby: babies crawl all over the place and are invading every corner of the drawing. Schmidt also takes inspiration from wood cut prints by the Japanese artist, Hokusai and Hiroshige. Re-photographing film stills from movies from the forties to the eighties Bastienne Schmidt takes a look how women were in big part marginalized not only in real life but also on the big screen. Schmidt re-photographs small sequences of specific film stills through doilies and sewing patterns, reemphasizing this aspect of women’s invisibility.
Bastienne Schmidt is a German/American artist who has exhibited nationally and internationally for over 20 years. Schmidt works as a multi media artist. She studied painting and photography in Italy. She grew up in Greece and Germany. Her work can be found in many museums’ collections such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The International Center of Photography, The Victoria and Albert Museum, and The Corcoran Gallery in Washington D.C. She has published 5 monographs, ‘VivIr la Muerte’, ‘American Dreams’,‘Shadowhome’, Home Stills’ and 'Topography of Quiet'. Schmidt ‘s first project ’Vivir la Muerte’ was shown in a one person exhibition at the International Center of Photography in New York. She was awarded the Kodak Prize in Germany for ’Vivir La Muerte’. She received a George Soros grant to document how Americans deal with death and dying. Her project Shadowhome won best Best Photo Book Prize in Germany and was exhibited in a one person exhibition at the Museum fuer Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg, Germany in 2005. Her last project ‘Home Stills’ was shown in a one person exhibition in the Southeast Museum of Photography in 2010, the Houston Center for Photography in 2012 and the Mange Museum in St.Petersburg, Russia.
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