Melanie Schiff “Run, Falls”

Kate Werble Gallery

poster for Melanie Schiff “Run, Falls”

This event has ended.

Melanie Schiff’s first solo exhibition at Kate Werble Gallery, Run, Falls is comprised of a series of photographs from 2014 that are comparable to an anthology of poems or stories, deeply rooted in the quality of light unique to Los Angeles, California, where Schiff has lived and worked since 2008.

Locale is significant to Schiff’s works, often creating a context that references history and landscape. Triple Falls, photographed in the Los Angeles National Forest, depicts the waterfall as a trembling or vibrating movement of water captured through the process of multiple exposures. The prism-like pattern that results reiterates the powerful experience of beholding a waterfall, while a smaller work with the same subject, Falls, suggests the possibility of an intimate experience with something vast and powerful.

Light itself continues to be a central focus of Schiff’s new works, appearing as a subject in Shroud, a work of radiance and space photographed through the holes of a dark black shredded canvas. Similarly, Threadbare I and Threadbare II depict the sun glaring through timeworn rugs, hung outside like free-floating tapestries. Alluding to a complicated history of decorative art and prayer, these pictures formally use cuts, holes and circles to expand upon ideas relating to aperture.

Schiff’s photographs span classical genres of portraiture, still life and performance, locating themselves within multiple histories of photography. Her new works Dancer and Broom and Double Dancer continue this reference to portraiture, an ode to Imogene Cunningham’s first photographs of Merce Cunningham. They are formally beautiful but point to an underlying discomfort visualized through the models’ full sleeve of tattoos appearing in contrast to her classical costume. A narrative exists between the two photographs, Dancer and Broom is almost still life while Double Dancer is akin to a Giacomo Balla Futurist painting, frenetically shaking as if taking flight.

Melanie Schiff (b. 1977 in Chicago, IL) received her BFA from New York University, Tisch School of the Art and her MFA from University of Illinois at Chicago. Schiff has had recent solo exhibitions at CAM Raleigh, NC (2013), University Galleries of Illinois State University (2012), Kavi Gupta Gallery, IL (2012) and was included in Jens Hoffman’s “Lens Drawings” at Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris. Her work has been exhibited at venues including MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, FL; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL, 2008 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

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Schedule

from May 10, 2014 to June 20, 2014

Opening Reception on 2014-05-10 from 18:00 to 20:00

Artist(s)

Melanie Schiff

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