︎

MATTHEW CONNORS




My Blank Pages by Michael Schmelling, The Ice Plant, 2015
photoeye.com



Review of Michael Schmelling’s My Blank Pages
Matthew Connors
photo-eye (March 29, 2016)

One particularly hot day last September I found myself in Long Island City’s First Ward School watching Michael Schmelling for what many would consider an inappropriately long time. Amid the din of overwhelmed art book enthusiasts who made their annual pilgrimage to the NYABF, Schmelling sat at his publisher’s table, quietly engrossed in his recent past. Methodically penciling margin notes inside copies of his new book, he was rehearsing a conversation between his memory and a personal archive of 4x6 machine prints that were the impetus for My Blank Pages.

The result is an oblique personal narrative that carries us through his former studios, apartments, meals, mumblings, relationships, stray thoughts, and itinerant work life. It is a decade peeled off into genres of experience and infused with the sad optimism of his departure from New York for Los Angeles. Chronology is loose and context is often sacrificed in favor of a life arranged in patterns and metaphors drenched in the light of his camera flash. Nested in the middle of the book, on another paper stock, is an abridged version of his 2008 book The Week of No Computer that offers more nuance to his self-portrait through free form scraps of experience and Sharpie poetics.

His penciled annotations provide a running commentary on the parallax between life itself and life depicted. They are lyrical murmurs seemingly lifted from remembered dialog, diaristic footnotes, and a compendium of title ideas that would provoke the envy of David Berman. Uniquely handwritten into each copy of the book, these scribbles provide a hypnotic oscillation between past and present selves.

My Blank Pages is a messy and intimate attempt to excavate a rapidly receding past; to show us what can be revealed about the self through the careful accumulation of casually recorded observations. It is the product of an artist crippled by both a good and bad memory, who has climbed a mountain to look down and admire his own pants. Schmelling has deftly slipped us into what Ben Lerner calls the profound experience of the lack of profundity, and invites us to fill our own blank pages.

Review of Michael Schmelling’s My Blank Pages
Matthew Connors
photo-eye (March 29, 2016)

One particularly hot day last September I found myself in Long Island City’s First Ward School watching Michael Schmelling for what many would consider an inappropriately long time. Amid the din of overwhelmed art book enthusiasts who made their annual pilgrimage to the NYABF, Schmelling sat at his publisher’s table, quietly engrossed in his recent past. Methodically penciling margin notes inside copies of his new book, he was rehearsing a conversation between his memory and a personal archive of 4x6 machine prints that were the impetus for My Blank Pages.

The result is an oblique personal narrative that carries us through his former studios, apartments, meals, mumblings, relationships, stray thoughts, and itinerant work life. It is a decade peeled off into genres of experience and infused with the sad optimism of his departure from New York for Los Angeles. Chronology is loose and context is often sacrificed in favor of a life arranged in patterns and metaphors drenched in the light of his camera flash. Nested in the middle of the book, on another paper stock, is an abridged version of his 2008 book The Week of No Computer that offers more nuance to his self-portrait through free form scraps of experience and Sharpie poetics.

His penciled annotations provide a running commentary on the parallax between life itself and life depicted. They are lyrical murmurs seemingly lifted from remembered dialog, diaristic footnotes, and a compendium of title ideas that would provoke the envy of David Berman. Uniquely handwritten into each copy of the book, these scribbles provide a hypnotic oscillation between past and present selves.

My Blank Pages is a messy and intimate attempt to excavate a rapidly receding past; to show us what can be revealed about the self through the careful accumulation of casually recorded observations. It is the product of an artist crippled by both a good and bad memory, who has climbed a mountain to look down and admire his own pants. Schmelling has deftly slipped us into what Ben Lerner calls the profound experience of the lack of profundity, and invites us to fill our own blank pages.



My Blank Pages by Michael Schmelling, The Ice Plant, 2015 photoeye.com