Exhibition

BFA Visual and Critical Studies presents “Relics,” an exhibition of sculpture and drawings by Jeffrey Schiff. The exhibition will be on view from Monday, September 29, through Wednesday, October 29, at the Flatiron Project Space, 133 West 21 Street.

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” Faulkner famously asserted. No doubt so, but what of the past that has utterly vanished and is truly irrecoverable? Jeffrey Schiff’s recent sculpture explores our uncertain relationship to that past through the device of the “relic”—a fragment of material evidence from the past revered by virtue of its very survival into the present. His work focuses on rubble—perhaps the most ubiquitous image of our epoch—as the disregarded relic of buildings originally assembled to endure. Schiff’s new sculpture is a response to real estate developers’ wholesale decimation of industrial Gowanus, the neighborhood surrounding his studio of 35 years, with echoes of archaeologies elsewhere.

Dislocating rubble from its original site, Schiff resets it in a containing structure – a reliquary of sorts. Like virtually all the collected objects that populate our museums, the rubble is extracted from the cultural domain from which it arose and then resituated for deliberate observation. The reliquary proposes to maintain the relic independent from the normative world of cause and effect, so as to sustain a place untethered-to-site and a time out-of-time. As in his earlier work, Schiff’s reliquaries raise questions about contingent relations of parts to whole, and the valuation of objects and actions.

Accompanying the sculpture are drawings that imagine the permanent mortaring of the fields of rubble left from the demolition of Gowanus. These are proposals for an impossible future, no longer actionable since the sites have now been transformed into high-rise luxury apartment buildings. The drawings memorialize the brief interval of transformation between Gowanus' past and present.

Jeffrey Schiff is an artist living and working in Brooklyn. He has exhibited broadly and has produced several permanent public commissions; his work has been reviewed in numerous publications including Artforum, Art in America, and the New York Times. Recipient of the Rome Prize of the American Academy in Rome, the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Fulbright Scholar Fellowship to India, he is Professor of Art, Emeritus at Wesleyan University.