The filtered, dappled light that glimmered through the branches is echoed in the shimmer of these gilded prints. With this meditative process I explore what I feel as much as I see. Elevating the ephemeral, I follow intuitively where each image takes me, honoring the variations within the edition. Senses enveloped, I am immersed in a state of grace. Being there was exactly where I needed to go.

-       Wendi Schneider, 2022

Wendi Schneider’s first solo exhibition at Rick Wester Fine Art, Into the Mist, is titled for her contemplative response to her pilgrimage into nature as a means of escaping the uncertainty of 2020. Schneider spent time in the mountains of North Carolina practicing shinrin-yoku (forest bathing), a Japanese exercise of being in and reconnecting to the natural world as an antidote to technology and stress. Where the mist shielded the woods, she encountered an atmosphere that reminded her of her childhood in the South, creating an ethereal blanket that erased all sense of time.

Returning to her studio in Denver, Schneider was inspired to recreate her experience through her photography practice which incorporates a decades old fascination with, and study of, the Photo Secession, the proto-Modernist movement borne by Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Clarence White, Anne Brigman and others, along with its historical markers. Schneider’s own collection of photogravures and other non-silver printing methods from Stieglitz’s early 20th century photography periodical Camera Notes and Camera Work inform her vision and technique, giving new life to the archaic processes. This harkening back to the roots of photography as a printmaking process, successfully building a bridge between traditional silver-based photography and digital printmaking, further establishes ambiguity in the etymology of the final print. 

John Szarkowski once notably distinguished the difference between the touch of photographers in creating their prints, and that of the lithographer, accurately stating that there was tremendous difference in the first ten prints of any photograph whereas the printmaker’s job was consistency in every numbered print.  Each example in Schneider’s editions of five are distinct, further speaking to the uniqueness of her process. Any two prints of each Into the Mist photograph, while depicting the same image, reveal different pigmentations and undertones. Some may show a sharper contrast and sense of the trees being clouded in layers of vaper whereas some are more saturated and clearer, as if the fog is lifting. The works are printed with archival pigment ink on Japanese kozo paper made from the inner bark of mulberry trees, and then gilded with white gold leaf on the verso. The subject matter blends with the materials of nature itself to evoke their own histories.

Schneider is a Denver based artist who received a BA in Painting from Newcomb College at Tulane University. She transitioned to photography in the early 1980s after being inspired by using a camera to reference models for her paintings. Schneider’s photographs are held in the permanent collections of The New Orleans Museum of Art, The Center for Creative Photography, The Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, The Auburn University Library Special Collections, in addition to numerous private collections. Her work has been exhibited internationally.