After a year-long Fulbright Fellowship to the prestigious Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki, Carrie Schneider returns to Chicago with a body of new work for her first solo exhibition with moniquemeloche gallery. Schneider sets up impossible scenarios that pit a character (usually herself) against some force of nature. Through a complex web of personal mythologies, Schneider throws herself into fantasies of escape and concealment, creating uneasy resonances with simple juxtapositions. The result is a series of large-scale photographs and two 16mm films that continue to heighten the familiar to a level of precarious strangeness
Carrie Schneider (born Chicago, 1979 lives Chicago) earned her MFA (2007) from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BFA from Carnegie Mellon University (2001). Schneider attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2007, and has just returned from a yearlong Fulbright Fellowship to the Kuvataideakatemia Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki. Her work has recently been acquired by The Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Photography. In the past year her work has been included in a number of group exhibitions including The Ties That Bind: Spencer Murphy & Carrie Schneider at Gallery 44, Toronto and Tense Territories at Santralistanbul, Istanbul, Turkey curated by Aura Seikkula. In January 2009 she will open a solo exhibition at The Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki.