Clayton Schiff. Routing

About

Routing finds Schiff focusing his attentions more deeply, in directions inward and outward, situating his subjects along pathways resembling roads, communications networks, medical diagrams, subway maps, tangled webs of cables, and generally pondering life’s many bewildering journeys. Like his figures, which are all the more human in their absence of features, these are pathways without geographic borders, and often without place. They snake off into the horizon, infinitely extensible and without proper relation to distance and scale, maddeningly lacking in markers, or else resembling a kind of ambient space, in which pathway, and time itself, is suspended. To enter Schiff’s “all journey, no destination” universe is to succumb to a kind of crushing sameness, a relentless and terrifying equanimity of all things.