Clémentine
Schneidermann
2013 - 2018
text
overview
Projects
Ffasiwn
I Called her Lisa Marie
Johnny B Goode
Heads of the Valleys
Camelot Court
Concerts
The Hunt
Blushes
Elea
Sète
In this considered and empathetic series made over a five-year period, Schneidermann explores the cult of Elvis as it manifests in working-class towns in South Wales, with a focus on Porthcawl, site of the annual Porthcawl Elvis Festival, the self- proclaimed largest festival of its kind anywhere in the world. She also follows a young boy called John-Paul from Wigan who, with his mother Alison and grandmother Margaret, travels to Memphis to perform as an Elvis tribute artist under the stage name ‘Johnny B. Goode’. The dramatic tension in Schneidermann’s work springs from the counterpoint of the bright neon lights, gaudy costumes and brazen commerciality of the cult of Elvis in Memphis with the post-industrial banality of its transatlantic iteration in Wales. This is the American Dream meets Brexit Britain, wherein the dream-imbued spatial iconography of stage, screen, commerce and street (most evident, of course, at Graceland) is co-opted by ordinary people living in a very different time – and place – to that which gave rise to Elvis in the 1950s. Inevitably, melancholy occasionally appears amidst the beauty of these photographs.
The title of this exhibition refers to a woman called Liz, who Schneidermann met in Newport, and who told the photographer: ‘I called [my daughter] Lisa-Marie, but she doesn’ know the meaning of it.
text by Lucy Kumara Moore on the occasion of the solo show at Sion & Moore, 2019