Description:
Long wooden deck with a concrete block and rock at one end with the other end built into the hillside. The concrete block has large stone embedded and protruding. Site-specific, public art
Label Text:
Jeffrey Schiff is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, receiving an M.F.A. in sculpture from the Department of Art in 1976. He was invited to create a site-specific installation at the University Gallery (now the University Museum of Contemporary Art) in 1981. Schiff’s artworks are greatly influenced by his travels, and "Revision," the installation at UMass, was a response to his observations in Rome “where architects built on Etruscan foundations and where medieval apartments were constructed among the ruins of coliseums.” For "Revision," Schiff built a new structure inside the Gallery, reversing and restructuring the axes of the existing space. The new structure became a metaphor for the way one culture overlays its identity on an earlier one.
"Separate Ground" was created for a juried alumni exhibition at the University Gallery in 1984 and it was subsequently re-sited at Hillside, the Chancellor’s Residence at the behest of UMass alumna Lois Beurman Torf (Class of 1946) and then-chancellor Joseph Duffy. About "Separate Ground" Schiff has said, “I confined nature as well as honoring it. A well-like plaster form encased part of the rock and a pier extended from it. It was a little stage: a small mountain range on which one could walk.” (Art New England, January 1984, pp. 14-15)
Schiff lives in Brooklyn and is a professor at Wesleyan University. Among his recent projects is "Everywhere Chidambaram," a three-part installation about his observations of Indian life and temple ritual.
Tags:
public spaces Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=UM+1984.29 |
