Jeffrey Schiff

  

Second Sight
 
   

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Year: 1983
Materials: plaster, fir
Dimensions: 2.5' x 29' x 26'

Inspired by Roman structures built upon abandoned Etruscan foundations, Second Sight is a space superimposed upon a space within the exhibition space. The specific topographic conditions of the gallery were the basis for a space demarcated by plaster columns and well, and over this, the space of an elevated wooden platform.

SECOND SIGHT
An Installation by Jeffrey Schiff

Second Sight is a space superimposed upon a space within yet another space. Inspired by Roman structures built upon abandoned Etruscan foundations, the sculpture represents an analogous cultural succession. Culture is not a closed system. It is molded by innumerable forces from within and without, from the past as well as the present. Second Sight suggests a past submerged in the present - a past that nonetheless persists in its new context.

I approached the gallery as if I were a settler first occupying a plot of land. The room provided specific topographic conditions - rectilinearity, a certain size and means of entry, an empty neutrality. I responded to these by defining a new space within the walls - a large rectangle demarcated by plaster posts and centered on a plaster slab and well. The cast plaster elements are archaic in their simplicity, weight, and reference to fundamental stone construction.

Over this centralized space, I built another structure which contrasts sharply with the first. This overlay is shifted off-register from the plaster space; it is elevated rather than earth-bound, axial rather than centralized, and built in the Japanese wood construction vernacular rather than that of Greco-Roman masonry building. It is both the Second Sight - a second vision of how to formulate space, and the second site - literally, a second habitable space.