by Niki Grangruth
Melanie Schiff's new body of work, "The Mirror," follows in a
trajectory of the artist's voyage through the standard genres of
photography. While Schiff's previous work focused on contemporary youth
culture through a series of portraits of twenty-somethings and
beautiful still lives of beer bottles and CD cases, her new work
explores the same themes through the landscape.
Many photographs in this series show gritty, concrete drainage
corridors and sewage canals marked with graffiti. However, the
photographs are oddly pastoral. "The River" depicts a long river wall,
defaced with graffiti, extending beyond view. Although the writing on
the wall is done in vibrant colors, the light caused by hazy cloud
cover mutes the entire image. The one point perspective creates an
almost spiritual sense of infinity or eternity, despite the beer and
paint cans strewn about in the near-empty riverbed.
Similarly
"Light Pipe" depicts a romantic, spiritual experience, juxtaposed by
the concrete, claustrophobic water pipe. Although this may be a too
literal interpretation of the phrase, "there is light at the end of the
tunnel," Schiff has a highly tuned ability to capture beauty in the
banal.
In contrast to the manmade tunnels and riverbeds,
"Mastodon" depicts a fallen tree on a bed of brown grass. The sprawling
tree seems to be emerging from the earth, latching on to the ground
with its appendages to pull itself from the dirt. The tree takes on a
human or animal presence and the viewer is witness to the sad struggle
to fight it's way to the surface of the earth.
Through the
use of the contemporary landscape, Schiff find a distinctly prehistoric
sensibility -- from the creature emerging from the ground, to the
graffiti ridden walls that are reminiscent of primitive cave paintings.
Although the photographs are pastoral in the use of hazy, muted color
and flat, consistent light, there is also something raw about them that
is not as obvious in Schiff's previous work. But what's missing in this
series is a purposefully vague sense of narrative, but it retains the
same sense of banal grandeur and mysticism.
Filed under: Uncategorized
