URI Gallery
Jeffrey Schiff
Dec. 3 – 20, 1980

Jeffrey Schiff creates spaces in the most unlikely ways. Spaces within spaces, suggested by drawing – not a drawing that defines lines but planes. Even the planes here are evanescent as if Schiff delimits his special space by subtraction as much as by addition. The experience of standing within two spaces – one of which has an architectural reality and the other only a perceptual reality is singular in Schiff’s installations. The trace of gestures in the powdered graphite, the clean crispness of his edges and planes, the almost stark, meditative interior and the basic polarity of black and white all begin to clue us into an even more subtle group of dichotomies in Schiff’s work. Planes that exist or ones that are invisible, two planes co-terminous or contiguous with each other, one space, a square-ish court nestled within the boundaries (or almost nestled within the boundaries) of a more awkward, quirky space – these are some of the perceptual balances addressed by Schiff in the present installation.

Ronald J. Onorato
Assistant Professor of Art