Jeffrey Schiff

  

High Mesa
 
   

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Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University
Year: 1986
Materials: fir, stone, concrete
Dimensions: 18' x 23' x 23'

A platform constructed within the gallery architecture, High Mesa is an archetypal artist's dwelling. A small boulder and cast stair steps up from the gallery's travertine floor to an elevated wooden platform that embraces and penetrates the gallery architecture. A thickened and bleached wooden area marks a place of repose before a window onto the landscape. A cast plaster well penetrated by burnt tree branches forms a hearth; and an opening cut into the floor overhanging the gallery stairwell and a pool of water below marks a vertiginous well.

ROSE ART MUSEUM
Brandeis University
Waltham, MA

High Mesa: a plateau atop a Cliffside, looking out over a landscape vista and down onto a spring below. As envisioned by sculptor Jeffrey Schiff, these are nature's counterparts to the architectural elements of the museum's topography, specifically floor, staircase, window and pool. Built into this visionary landscape he has conceived and constructed a dwell: a minimal archetypal living space with floor, bed, hearth and well. So begins our journey though Schiff's sculptural environment where sensations are unlocked and visions inspired - quietly and slowly over time.

In the coexistent realities that are revealed and the rich overlays that emerge between nature and architecture (museum, mesa and dwelling), natural and man-made materials (branches, stone, lumber, concrete), and the interplay between pre-existing and newly created spaces forms, we discover multiple references to the complex layers of meaning and experience common to any environment we encounter during the normal course of our daily lives.

Likening the dwelling to an artist's studio, Schiff sees this sculpture as a holistic environment dedicated to the creative process itself. He has constructed three distinct but integrated physical spaces, each designating a particular type of function or behavior. Our passage from one space to another is across an elevated wood floor, accessible via three steps made of natural stone and concrete. There we encounter these forms: a bed - a restful contemplative place belonging to the interior but visually connected to the outside; a hearth (whose charred branches are evidence of atleast a singe use) - a place where a creative process is enacted and physically realized; a well - an extension of a safe interior space to a possibly dangerous exterior one.

With High Mesa, Schiff puts us in touch with our own physical presence in known and unknown spaces and explores the complex but delicate interplay of form, space, perception and experience.