American artist Shelbi Schroeder makes photographs that have a sort of old world breathlessness to them. Her recent White series is made up of landscapes of pristine clouds, the subjects caught at the moment of snowy solitude and purity. Still others show the moment of sexual pleasure, where memories, rivers of time, a sense of other worldliness collide to become a moment of release and liberation. Explicitness has its place, I am no enemy of confrontational sexual imagery, however, we can look to a way of working wherein sensuality is all-consuming, yet not direct.

Nevertheless, I would add the Shelbi does not shy away from direct imagery entirely, her large-scale Instax project involved taking pictures of her nude body for an extended period of time, and asking a select group of participants to do the same.

Through this practice, she is confronted with the feminine bodily self, rather than being confronted with another’s idea of female sexuality and pleasure. These moments brought forth a transformation of her own vision of her true self, the role of desire and agency.  > Read More

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It’s hard to reinvent the nude, but former Las Vegan Shelbi Schroeder has done just that—turned the same old body we’re so used to seeing into something fresh, mysterious and vital. Swoon features nine works in 12-by-12-inch frames, each exhibiting a single Fujifilm Instax Mini color instant photo of a tiny nude body. It’s so tiny, you have to lean into it, face almost against the glass. You stare. The mind blinks. Then it happens: that hard-to-describe transporter moment when an art object becomes a portal to another world.

Schroeder takes us to an ethereal place where bodies seemingly come to life. Hovering on the verge of manifestation, they lift, float and emerge from white ground. In the aptly-named “White #12,” for example, a faint line suggests a hip. The thighs come into view—the head is perhaps discernible, the flesh of the buttocks—but most of the torso blends into a featureless landscape. The body might wholly materialize if you look long enough, or it might disappear back into the nothingness from which it came. > Read More

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