Kate Schneider

How to Understand a Rock is a deconstructed field guide that employs play, touch, and intimacy to discuss the relational disconnect between humans and the more-than-human world.

The rocks in this series come from a shield of Precambrian granite that blankets much of Canada (commonly known as the Canadian Shield) and ranges from 2 to 3 billion years old. While holding these rocks, most of which come from my childhood rock collection, I am struck by the incomprehensibility of deep time and the inexact and absurd ways we try to understand their life and formation. We know the basic structure of our planetary evolution, but when it comes to knowing the exact birth of a rock, we can only say it took between 10 minutes to 4.5 billion years to create.

Moving beyond scientific certainty, I want to know how it feels to cradle an inanimate and essentially unknowable object. Is it comforting? Whimsical? Or even familial? Attempting to relate to something outside the human time scale is a contradiction; however, that contradiction makes human-geological intimacy fascinating.

Kate Schneider, 2023

The Cuyahoga River in Cleveland, Ohio caught fire ten times between 1860 – 1969.

As a Cleveland native, this series might be about a river, but really, it’s an auto-ethnography about homesickness.

This series is still in development.

Landscapes of Resistance looks at the individuals and landscapes in four water protector communities in the United States. From the Keystone XL and DAPL pipelines in the Great Plains to the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, all of these communities are on the frontlines of North American land and water issues. The communities in this photo-series vary in their geography, culture, and location – from rural to urban, Indigenous to settler, encampment to domicile. Uniting each community is their commitment to preserving and repairing their home, and the alliances they form with their environment. From drying laundry at a protest camp to a quiet moment at a political rally, the images in this series ask the viewer to consider the subtle ways water protectors leave their trace on the land. Such moments rest between the profound, the banal, and the mundane; however, these moments contrast the (in)action of government agencies and industrial development while considering the lasting relationship between community and ecology.

This series is still in development.

Sister Writes is a collaboration between Kate Schneider and the writing workshop Sister Writes based in Toronto, Ontario.

Dear President Obama,

 …The air, earth, and water, which sustain us, have no voice. As stewards of the land, we are very aware of our surroundings and the footprints we leave behind. We must speak for the land. We ask you to protect our nation, the earth, air, and water. Reject the KXL pipeline.

Sincerely,
Bonny Kilmurry

The Kilmurrys are not your average environmental activists. Wearing a uniform of Wranglers, snap-button shirts, and cowboy hats, the family is more reminiscent of Little House on the Prairie than eco-activism.

On their 6,000-acre ranch in the Nebraska Sandhills, Richard and Bonny Kilmurry live a seemingly simple existence that belies their quiet intelligence and fierce independence. When the Kilmurry family received a letter from the TransCanada Corporation in 2012 stating that their ranch could host a portion of a 1,833-mile tarsands oil pipeline, the apolitical family, by nature distrustful of environmentalists, found themselves on the front-lines of the Keystone XL pipeline protest movement. This reluctant environmentalism is not unique to the Kilmurrys. The KXL movement aligned groups who were previously segregated and perhaps even antipathetic – liberal environmentalists, conservative ranchers and farmers, and Native Americans – to fight for the rejection of the proposed “black snake.”

In Imperial Landscape, W.J.T. Mitchell states, “Landscape is a natural scene mediated by culture. It is both a represented and presented space…”[1] The fact is that since the birth of Manifest Destiny, the prairies have been caught between duelling interests. While one side envisions the land as a site for expansion, the other side envisions the land as a site of stewardship. These competing (re)presentations of the land not only speak to the history of the prairies but also speak to the current fight over the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. The question becomes, what is current cultural value the prairies?

We, The Heartland is a love-letter to the cultural landscape of the prairies. Photographs made along the proposed Keystone XL pipeline route in Nebraska and South Dakota are paired with handwritten letters from landowners and Lakota natives to President Obama. The landscapes address the unseen threat the proposed pipeline poses to the land, and the accompanying letters address the indexical relationship between the land and those who seek to preserve it.

[1] Mitchell, W.J.T. “Imperial Landscape,” in Landscape and Power, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 5

Landscape is mutable. What once was grand can fall into decay. What is now withered can become verdant.

This photo-essay looks at the symbolic features of place and the changing landscape of post-industrial America through the urban farming movement in Cleveland, Ohio. Within the urban farming movement, emerges two key narrative themes that are laden with rich and opposing imagery: decline and birth. The abandoned lot that once housed a factory is now the home to grazing sheep. Traces of a lost industrial society are camouflaged by mulch and growth.

Urban farming points to the decline of American industrialism, and the renewal of vacant land into a functioning and thriving landscape. This project aims to create a dialog on the changing boundaries of urban and rural, and the purpose of vacant land in a city’s urban core.

The air is drenched with the smells of burning rubber, stale beer and sweat. Men, sitting on the sidelines, stare intently as cars plow into each other. A stream of soot emerges from a burning engine. A cacophony of revving engines and crunching metal assaults the ears. Mud flies. Engines roar. Fans heckle. Cars are decimated. The cycle repeats until one car remains.  The demolition derby is a spectacle of the sensory extreme and the object of play – the car – is mutilated and maimed.

To ask a driver why he (or she) runs in a demolition derby is to get a myriad of answers. Their reasons are generally indefinable and in some cases rest only on the emotions surrounding the event. As, Lonnie “Hotdog” Hick, says, “you can’t shoot someone, so when someone pisses you off out in the track you can take your anger out on them. It’s the next best thing to hurting someone.” [1] Not all drivers love wrecking cars simply because of its carnal nature. Although most say they do it simply for fun; their true reasons are more illustrative of their passion for the sport and how it is indelibly tied to their relationships in their community. For many drivers the demolition derby is a family tradition that was formed in the new site of family engagement – the family garage. The hours of building and welding a former hunk of junked metal into a deafening demolition machine is a process that morphs both the dispensable car and worker into something that is revered and celebrated.

Building off of the lived experiences of the individual drivers and the demolition derby community, this essay reveals demolition derby as a sensually extreme site that fosters notoriety in a stratum of men who have been marginalized and largely forgotten by globalization. This activity is a performance, and if, as Tomie Hahn says, “performance provides a special metaphoric space, often revealing how people make sense of their lives and communities,”[2] what then, does demolition derby reveal about the drivers? Demolition derby is a moment for these sentimentalists, motor heads, and thrill seekers to transcend, “…the constitutive ambiguity of everyday situations….”[3] Notoriety graces the forgotten, for the seemingly daft farm hand is known for his masterful building skills, and the prosaic, pudgy accountant from suburban Dayton is the most revered driver in the state of Ohio.

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[1] Lonnie Hicks. Interview by author. Raymond, Ohio, July 10, 2010

[2] Tomie Hahn. “”It’s the Rush” Sites of the Sensually Extreme,” The Drama Review 50 no. 2 (2006): 88

[3] Roland Barthes, Mythologies. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 23