Gail Schneider
Artist Statement
My present work is influenced by ancient Babylonian friezes of brick which often depicted animals and the violent conquest of nature and how these records of extinction and control come forward to us in our own time of trouble. Those first city experiments were based on mining, primarily soil and water, for the first large crops which depended on slavery and, at such an astonishingly early stage, conformity. I feel that civilization has so vastly expanded and made extraction the central issue of its survival that disappearance itself must be and will be dismissed. My desire is to bring a novel tension to these issues if we are going to have the multiple awarenesses necessary for the foundation of future alternatives.
To present this as visual facts, I combine many different materials into the forms the viewer sees here. For me, these forms invoke sudden, unexpected senses of transformation that, from our most basic origins, pose questions about how we might discover a home for the realities that give us a hold on our planetary lives, or not.