Artist Statement

My work focuses on themes that surround archiving, identity, objectification and outlying. Several of my projects are long-term and involve layering, rearranging and augmenting created and found imagery within the context of an archive.

I seek, build and appropriate material to create artworks that break down law enforcement and queer social topics. Through an organizing process, my work aims to address the complexity of systems that obscure how we see others through images.

Leatherpower

American Photography and road trip images share a long distance relationship. A trajectory once coined straight photography has overtly been revisioned through a queer sight-line in the last decade. This approach, in time, has generated alternative tracks to a curious photographer's right of passage; driving, looking and capturing.

Leatherpower bridges two indirect spaces tied to fringe history. (1) 1980's graphic printed matter, a critical platform for gay men to correspond, call and offer services, as well as (2) intimate landscapes, a place where curious men secretly engage in promiscuous encounters. These images engage both outlets through a layering process to create a bridge.

Channeling the quintessential American pop art movement; a time when sexually bent art began to enter the front of high-commercial acceptance. Covert still life magazine arrangements are placed alongside the highway and photographed. The photographed imagery is then juxtaposed alongside facsimiles and editorial spreads that offer an intimate glimpse of idled bodies, advertisements, secret identities and glossy surface. These images throw queer signals into an editorialized format with an index of gestures and codes. 

Perfect Safety

Perfect Safety positions itself in obscurity.  A slippage into fragmented experiences where imagery becomes physical evidence in a conflated journey of potential crimes. This space is a world of men and their devices — filled with an index of languages and codes. 

Systems, symbols, and methods play out in devious precision; exacting a cause and effect. Here, in Perfect Safety, we learn to embody the necessary motions required to assimilate and defend, while concomitantly enduring a transplant-rejection of truth.  

Some images are layered and flattened— re-flattened and aligned into a guide of outcomes unanswered. Other images conceal dead spaces that invert the document, realigning again, to examine some structure of time. 

Perfect Safety is a series of questions kin with many other works by Schonberger. A heavy amount of policing and its institutional objects, juxtaposing obscure moments interrogating the masculine, aberrant, and queer. What is absent within these pages is the hand of a collaborator. Schonberger is alone. 

Brian Carpenter, Assistant Professor of Art + Gallery Director
The University of Toledo

Hammer

In 2015, I conducted a series of interviews with a retired police officer in their home just outside of Detroit, MI. The officer granted me permission to photograph their collections of objects and images they made and saved during their time on the police force. I extracted items such as personal photographs, found and confiscated images, paraphernalia, homemade weapons, newspaper clippings, tools, awards, signage, and garments. The images that follow are an effort to augment and make sense of a deeply personal and fragmented archive of complicated histories.

Years later, I selected specific items within the images created from the collection to be sculpted as three dimensional glass objects as well as neon signs. A second physical archive became the result of the process.

Beautiful Pig

In 2012 I acquired a collection of photographs from a retired former Detroit Police officer, Marty Gaynor, whom I began to interview weekly over a course of two years. Among his thousands of photographs were images that he had taken in the line of duty.  By cataloguing, arranging, and interpreting his work, I gave it the parameters of an archive. I arranged Marty’s images to create documents in the format of a grid. Each grid was presented to Marty as a canvas for him to transcribe a narration for his images.

I infiltrated and paired the grids with images I had taken during my investigation and interaction with Marty. After organizing the images, I began to struggle with indexical notations the archive revealed when presented as unified work. I embarked on an image making process along side Marty to see if I could understand the realities of identity, spirituality, and empathy.