Carrie Marie Schneider

This tool kit was made as my submission to Lynne McCabe's Room to be (Ms.)Understood book. Room to be (Ms.)understood was a Social Sculpture Workshop, a University of Houston class, a Blaffer Museum exhibition, and a Mitchell Center experiment that engaged students and non-students in excavating an untold feminist side of social practice history.

Using detourned psychoanalytic games from Elsewhere's Collection, Jess Schreibstein and I performed certified personalysis practitioners and analyzed "clients." Their color prescription was handed to personal shoppers who dressed them from Collection. The transformation was documented with aura portraits by Pete Maarseven. Documentation of the performance includes color prescriptions, true self drawings, developed photographs, and altered game pieces inside of "Guess Who" "Personalysis" and "Tantalizer." The Transformatorium sign and my certification of personalysis, signed by Freud, hang outside the wardrobe. The work was Inspired by game theory and the late night game club with Jessie, Colin, and Pete.

Inspired by Two Stage Transfer Drawings by Dennis Oppenheim and the scores of Pauline Oliveros, Touch Telephone is an evolving composition using touch as medium and as conduit. Participants sit in a circle of hands on backs, wearing blindfolds and earplugs. With blurred ambient senses of sight and sound, the task is to complete a linear circuit determined by one anothers’ transmission of the touch. Scores in the composition range from a bare, calming relay to the struggle of transmitting touch as a pre-lingual, simultaneous transfer. So far, Touch Telephone has existed at Harold Arts in Chesterhill, OH, Elsewhere in Greensboro, NC, and TxRx, Write Clique, and with Girl Band in Houston, TX. Lavender blindfolds were made in collaboration with Emily Ensminger, Hospitality Curator at Elsewhere, and remain in the collection as sleep masks. Documentation was provided by Jessie Martin.

A failed anonymous, reciprocal participatory message exchange project based on stages of life. A successful reconnaissance operation of installing 35 stage exchange boxes at even intervals within the Houston's 610 loop. http://stageexchange.blogspot.com/

Who Belongs was an intervention at a busy Houston intersection where a hyper-insulated, master-planned, upscale condo/retail development replaced two city blocks. The private company overtook the public sidewalk with a fence that hid construction and advertised who they wish to attract. I inserted matching 9' tall silhouettes of who was actually there building it for them every day, but ultimately being shut out.

I tell a story to a participant and they share a story with me. I remember their story and retell it to the next participant, in exchange for a story from them. The formal chain ended at 170 stories traded. Untrackable in its entirety and only documentable as a fraction of the entire work, Story Trading's medium is the gesture of exchange, left as traces in each participants experience.

To create a social network that would span the most opposite cultural environments and academic specializations I could imagine, I facilitated an exquisite corpse collaboration between artists at Maryland Institute College of Art and physicists at Texas A&M University in which each group used their respective language to converse with the other.

A Self Compassion is a practice of suturing my present self to lost and disconnected moments of my past. I spoke a continously revised dialog to younger versions of myself to scale; singing, soothing, warning, screaming messages that are both salient to me as an individual and relatable as common experiences of growing up. A Self Compassion evolved through photography, video, and performance. I will continue the practice at ten year intervals.

Argentine tango is an intimate, interactive, and immediate art. At a milonga I had each tanguero and tanguera write a message on the palm of their partner before beginning to dance. The hot Houston night and the intense, intimate dance of tango dissolved our messages into the palms of one another. Photos of the unread messages were shared only later, inserting language that described a connection into the memory of a sensed experience.

To subject the physical embodiment of a word to a process that negates its meaning I carved the word "STUCK" out of salt licks from a local feed store and placed it on the shoreline for the salt water to dissolve and disperse.

According to the soft science of physiognomy, the right side of your face represents the dominant personality- the self which you present to the world, and the left side represents the recessive, introverted self. Physiognomy relies on the idea that your life determines your face as you age because facial bones are eroded and facial muscles are built up by the expressions that we habitually display. These expressions are determined by our reactions to events and our outlook on life (strong jutting jaw for an aggressive, assertive personality, weak chin for someone who looks at the floor, apologizes for their words). In a class on the doubling of reality I tested it out by showing each person's actual face, the right side mirrored, and the left side of the face mirrored. Each portrait is unrecognizable and yet also strangely telling.

Ten people are translated into flavors of ice cream and invited to taste each others identities. Artist/Biologist Adeetje Bouma and I concocted: Neil: honey nut cheerio milk, vanilla extract, peanut butter, pretzels. Eloise: lavender, chamomile, hibiscus, hyssop, white chocolate covered raisins. Joel: chocolate, coffee grounds, red hots, chili powder. Ben: ham sandwich. Tasting from unlabeled pints, the participants guessed who was who with 90% accuracy.

Installation for Drawn Together exhibition at labotanica: Each side of the window was provided with dry erase markers. An ongoing, evolving drawing from both interior and exterior perspectives activated borderspace as a transparent platform for dialog.

In the wake of Ike I collaborated with Houston artists in a healing ceremony based on a love letter I wrote to my hurricaned city and its harboring of Katrina victims. We used the flood waters which had spread so much destruction to dissolve the words and lave care throughout the city. A local musician's lullaby sung over the city was played while Houstonians' youtube footage of Ike flooded the ceremony space. I read the love letter line by line, dipping my hands into water and handing out each flooded page.