Melanie Schiff
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Melanie Schiff’s early photographs were inspired by the music she loved–the Jesus Lizard, Big Black, Sonic Youth. “There was such an emotional urgency to their songs,” Schiff says. “You hear a sad song and you feel like it’s your experience, and I wanted to make art like that, to make photos like that.” But her initial efforts were naively literal, and when she started grad school in 2000 at the University of Illinois at Chicago, she made “melancholy” portraits of girls in their teens and 20s. “I assumed that sad young girls would be interesting to everyone, but I wasn’t really making it interesting,” she says. “My first critique was a disaster, and I thought I had made a giant mistake in coming here, in pursuing photography.” She’s come a long way since then. Her 16 photos and one video at Kavi Gupta are visually and conceptually engaging: she often realigns objects as if discovering a new, hidden order to things.
