Noah Schneiderman 
SAUNTER

August 6 – September 17, 2022

The Valley is pleased to present SAUNTER, our first solo exhibition with Noah Schneiderman, a multi-disciplinary self-taught artist born in rural Illinois, currently living and working in Denver, Colorado. The primary focus of Schneiderman’s artistic practice is his paintings, which function as mirrors to his inner life and cultivate an understanding of self and an understanding of the world. In addition to painting, he makes sculptural work, furniture, naturally dyed garments, and other objects that blend multiple materials and modalities. Informed by nature, memory, and the mystical, his works seek to brush against that which lies just beneath the surface of everyday life.

As a self-taught artist, Schneiderman has learned much of his formal approach from study and admiration of other painters. Taking notes from studio visits, conversations, and coalescing inspiration from the wealth of content available online, he places himself in conversation with contemporaries like Maja Ruznic, Caleb Hahne-Quintana, Adam Alessi, Squeak Carnwath and Enrique Martinez Celaya. In the past, Schneiderman often worked directly with found images, changing the field of vision but relying on the image to unfold a narrative to the viewer. In this body of work, he ventures out on his own, revealing abilities for a multilayered approach to storytelling and a style of ethereal marks and richly textural surfaces. The works in this exhibition embody stretching out, wandering, beginning to trust oneself. 

The title for his exhibition, SAUNTER, was inspired by medieval pilgrims who became known as ‘saunterers,’ as they would be asked their destination when passing through villages and would reply “a la saint terre”- to the Holy Land. In SAUNTER, new paintings and works on paper depict figures moving through a landscape on a journey or quest, merging with their surroundings in a process of transfiguration. Trees and limbs tangle together, while suns, moons, and stars dance in the sky above, obfuscating time. Hazy visions of guides, figures from memory and myth, appear and then dissolve back into the dense forest. This story has all the magic of the hero’s journey archetype, but offers no clear ending, pinnacle, or triumph. Instead, it unveils the pilgrimage itself as the locus of the sought after Holy Land. 

Central to this discovery is seeing the morphing of figure and landscape in these paintings as an allegory for embracing the transformative nature of the journey. Once we are able to escape the teleological view of living as a process that should end in enlightenment or self-actualization, we can begin to recognize the spirit within the world around us. In her book “Tarot for Change,” Jessica Dore writes, “What would happen if we reoriented the imagination toward a way that sees the self both as dreamer and that which is dreamt? Could we make room for the possibility that what we feel and experience in the flesh house of the body is not always rooted in private individual experience, but comes from an ecosystem to which we belong? What if, for example, rather than seeing ourselves as taking a walk through the woods, we see ourselves as being a wave of energy rippling through the consciousness of a family of redwoods? How would this change the way we move through the environment we dwell in? How would it change the way we relate to experiences?”

In SAUNTER, instead of seeing the forest for the trees, we begin to see that the forest, the trees, and us are all part of a neverending echo, an ever-evolving story with no beginning and no end.