Everyday Beauty
by Fred Camper, Chicago Reader, January 5, 2007
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Everyday Beauty
By Fred Camper
January 5, 2007
Melanie Schiff
When Through 1/28
Where Kavi Gupta, 835 W. Washington
MELANIE SCHIFF'S EARLY photographs were inspired by the music she loved -- the Jesus Lizard, Big Black, Sonic Youth. "There was such an emotional urgency to their songs," Schiff says. "You hear a sad song and you feel like it's your experience, and I wanted to make art like that, to make photos like that." But her initial efforts were naively literal, and when she started grad school in 2000 at the University of Illinois at Chicago, she made "melancholy" portraits of girls in their teens and 20s. "I assumed that sad young girls would be interesting to everyone, but I wasn't really making it interesting," she says. "My first critique was a disaster, and I thought I had made a giant mistake in coming here, in pursuing photography." She's come a long way since then. Her 16 photos and one video at Kavi Gupta are visually and conceptually engaging: she often realigns objects as if discovering a new, hidden order to things.
Raised in Glencoe, Schiff sought escape from the blandness of suburban life in sci-fi novels ("I was a pretty big dork about them"). She also wrote poetry and made art but was "really bad at drawing," she says. For a photography class at New Trier she attempted to duplicate PJ Harvey album cover photos with herself as the subject: "I was a huge fan of her and her albums. I felt music was more emotionally communicative than art." She didn't like Edward Weston and Ansel Adams when she was introduced to their work in high school -- but she loved Cindy Sherman. Schiff attended Colorado College, then transferred to NYU, where she took a course with artist Carolee Schneemann, whom she considered "kind of crazy but brilliant." Schiff was especially impressed by Schneemann's Interior Scroll, a 1975 performance documented on video in which she pulls a scroll from her vagina and reads from it. "I thought, here is this totally gorgeous woman doing this really ugly, kind of crazed primal performance," Schiff says. Schneemann and other feminist artists, such as Hannah Wilke and Ana Mendieta, made Schiff think about "possession and self-awareness and connecting to the space around me." For her senior project at NYU she made a video of herself "committing suicide," then shot stills from it off a TV screen, using the layers of media to filter the scene's emotional impact. In grad school she did a series called "Sleeping Boys," which made men rather than women the subject of the camera's gaze: she photographed three different guys asleep in her bed, knowing it would raise questions about whether they were her lovers.
A year ago Schiff saw an early Sol LeWitt wall drawing in a Chicago home that inspired some of the work in this show. "It was really warm and delicate, like a Zen garden, and really domestic," she says. "These simple, thin lines almost felt feminine." Geometric abstraction might have seemed removed from the feminist approach that had previously interested her, but she'd already been making photos involving formal issues. In this exhibit Lagoon shows two glow sticks inside a beer bottle on the prow of a canoe. In Cases CD containers form a line at the edge of a rectangle of light on the floor. Lights shows three ceiling
lights and an irregular, glowing burst of light cast by the reflective surfaces of CD cases -- a study in the modest beauty of everyday things.
In 2004, when Schiff was thinking about connecting the body with its surroundings, she saw a conceptual photography exhibit in Minneapolis that included impressive work by Valie Export. "She had one photo," Schiff says, "in which she lay her body on the city street mimicking the curved curb." In Mud Reclining Schiff lies covered in mud next to the rounded edge of a Florida sinkhole. In Spit Rainbow she spits water at the camera; her confrontational stance is typical of feminist responses to the camera's gaze while the frame's tilt underscores her taunting persona. But the water makes a rainbow. "Beauty is something that shouldn't be left out," Schiff says.
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KaviGupta_Review13.pdf
Critic's Pick
by Brian Sholis, ArtForum.com, January, 2007
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Since her solo debut at this gallery, photographer Melanie Schiff has moved out of the studio and into the world, trading fussily arranged, evenly lit still lifes for more casual, serendipitous compositions of everyday objects. These photos are hymns to natural light, and the presence of rainbows, beer cans, and a Neil Young LP cover tempts one to characterize her gaze as a stoner’s glassy-eyed fixation. In Emergency, 2006, the sun, modulated by a porch screen, is a marble-size fireball resting atop a bottle of Jack Daniels. In another photograph, a single beam slices through a compact-disc jewel case, splitting into faint prisms that descend upon dull gray carpet. A third shows a green beer bottle balanced at the tip of a canoe, lit from within by two crisscrossed glow sticks; their angle continues the lines made by the edges of the thin-metal boat and is also found in the X composed of two arrows jutting from disused beer cans in a nearby picture. With sixteen photos and one unexpected (if not unwelcome) foray into video, the exhibition is a tad overhung, but even the oddball images—of the artist making Spit Rainbow, 2006, next to a backyard lemon tree, or a tapestry of drug bags plastered to a cracked window—add to the show’s drowsy-afternoon allure.
—Brian Sholis
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review12.pdf
Fotographia/Melanie Schiff
by Selva Barni, Rodeo, September, 2008
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review9.pdf
Future Greats
by Jonathan T.D. Neil, Art Review, March, 2009
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MELANIE SCHIFF
By
JONATHAN T.D. NEIL
Since her first solo show at the Kavi Gupta Gallery in Chicago at the end of 2006, Melanie Schiff’s photography has been received as that of a lackadaisical rocker, an easy producer of images that draw upon the tired life of places and things that are of little interest beyond their services as backdrops for late-night philosophizing fuelled by beer and dope. We know this culture by the qualifier of ‘youth’. It’s a noncommittal, quasi-commercial life, one not exactly at odds with the world, but not exactly at peace with it either.
The problem here is that such readings do little justice to Schiff’s achievement as deft composer – or rather compositionalist – of light and form. Her still lifes, light captures and other such composed scenes demonstrate a facility with ‘that old thing’ (analogue) photography that equals even Uta Barth’s more technical gymnastics; yet Schiff manages to make hew work appear as if it is somehow easily intuitive as opposed to rigorously worked through, which , in the end, it must be. Prints such as “Prism” (2005), “Cases” (2005), “Spit” (2006) and the much lauded “Emergency” (2006) – this last captures the distant fireball of the sun just as it caps a bottle of Jack Daniels in the foreground – reveal Schiff’s supreme comfort with the registration of light as such. And her more recent work, black-and-white portraits such as “Natalie I” (2008) and “Sarah” (2007), and the masterful Untitled (2008), ass to this comfort a Las Meninas-type dialogue on the circuit of the camera’s seeing, here multiplied by the layering of windows, mirrors and other reflective surfaces within the profilmic space.
On the whole it is elegant and, most important intelligent work. Schiff’s body-in-the-landscape pieces, such as “Mud Reclining” (2006) and “Skatepark” (2008), too-self-consciously evoke the specters of Ana Mendieta and VALIE EXPORT; but then again, these aren’t the worst artists to channel. Nevertheless, it is composition that Schiff understands, apparently, to a very natural degree, and it is by composition that her work will rise or fall – I suspect it will be the former.
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review7.pdf
What Would Neil Young Do?
by Herbert Martin, Modern Painters, March 2009
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review8.pdf
Melanie Schiff
by Lauren Viera, Chicago Tribune, September 2009
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review57.pdf
Melanie Schiff
by James Glisson, Artforum.com, September 2009
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Melanie Schiff
KAVI GUPTA GALLERY
835 West Washington
September 11–October 24
Melanie Schiff, Hellroom, color photograph, 2009, 31 1/2 x 35".
Melanie Schiff’s new series of photographs are called “narratives” in the gallery’s press materials, yet her pictures lack figures or anthropomorphized objects that might function as characters, much less any obvious sense of duration. The concrete viaducts and forlorn landscapes that Schiff captures are the functioning detritus of a normally invisible infrastructure that supports vast conurbations. (Perhaps these are part of the web of waterworks that service the parched Los Angeles area, where Schiff lives.)
Unit after unit, mile after mile, the viaducts are gigantic, yet in Schiff’s photographs these bland and imposing structures dematerialize. Take Hellroom, 2009, where the walls and floor of a huge drainage culvert are covered with mostly red graffiti so densely layered that the concrete surface transforms into something akin to intricately tattooed human skin. Further, the square shape of the culvert self-consciously mirrors the square format of the photograph, and the white-and-orange spots in each lower corner of the structure resemble overexposed patches on a negative. The photograph pulls in two directions: to the print’s surface and to the shimmering spray-painted cement. The man-made canyon nearly disappears between these competing poles. It is a ruin of sorts, not from long ago, but instead the recent past or even the present. Ruins manifest narrative in their decrepitude: how much their present form differs from what had once been pristine and new. Perhaps the narrative then resides in that gap and in the taut pull between surface and skin.
— James Glisson
Download PDF: KaviGupta_Review54.pdf