Melanie Schiff at Kavi Gupta

by Niki Grangruth

The Mirror

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.

The River

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.

Light Pipe

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.

Mastodon

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.