Jeffrey Schiff
Double Vision: Mappa Mundi
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Mappa Mundi (Portolani)
Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University
Year: 2011
Materials: Ink on 37 digital prints, sintra, steel, aluminum
Dimensions: 18'x 16'x 8'
Double Vision: Transactions of the American Philosophical Society
Double Vision is a solo exhibition of work by Jeffrey Schiff which exposes how unconscious projections from America’s colonial origins shape perceptions of its current reality. In 1786, one year before the constitutional convention, members of the American Philosophical Society, which included such luminaries as Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestly, published personal accounts of the natural world in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society. Schiff’s artworks extrapolate from these historical texts to reveal the era’s unresolved struggle between rationality and superstition, democratic ideals and cultural traditions of elitism and slavery--struggles we have inherited as we negotiate conflicting views of scientific enterprise, globalism, religious and ethnic identity and the information age.