I couldn’t think of a better prologue to the opening of Death Becomes Her: A Century of Mourning Attire at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art than the haunting cello compositions performed by Icelandic musician, Hildur Guðnadóttir, in a pop-up concert this past Friday. Setting a transcendental tone befitting of the exhibit, which opens to the public today and centers around the sartorial mourning rituals of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries (a time when the mortality rate was much higher and the average person didn’t live into their fifties) — the cellist, who’s played with bands such as Múm and Animal Collective, wove soul-stirring Icelandic hymns about death with angelic alto lyrics and original songs of layered cello loops.

Three days later, walking down into the basement gallery where the Costume Institute exhibit is on display, I thought about the resounding affect of the cello and the ways in which death echoes throughout our culture, but is often linked with shadowed conversation and dark arts. Though the show’s theme sounds morbid, its tone is lightened by baroque music, and white mannequins whose presence is much less sinister than the masked ones at the Met’s Alexander McQueen show a couple years ago.

The anticipated exhibit, which displays some 30 dresses (including those of Queen Victoria and Queen Alexandra, the former of which wore various shades of mourning attire for the last 40 years of her life), were made primarily of carefully tailored black crape — the folds, pleats, and ruches mimicking the fashionable silhouettes of the time and the guidelines for mourning set forth by magazines advocating “nun-like simplicity” and etiquette guides outlining the mourning practice. Here we learn the deepest state of mourning is reserved for widowed women who show their loyalty by maintaining the dark affect, adding white accents and then gray or mauve to the stiff and dull appearance of black, only after a reasonable amount of time has passed.

These practical observations are juxtaposed by a cheeky sentimentality throughout the exhibit. The burden of this attire on one’s finances and even the ways in which some began to enjoy the all-black aesthetic are common threads throughout. The show is also punctuated by mourning accouterment, memorial embroideries, watercolors, and postmortem photos — which are also the subjects of an exhibit on view now in Brooklyn’s Morbid Anatomy Museum.

But even if wearing grief on one’s sleeve was a form of protection during social engagements, it was also an invitation for women to become targets in the gender-driven attire. Harold Koda, curator of the exhibit explains in the press release, “The veiled widow could elicit sympathy as well as predatory male advances. As a woman of sexual experience without marital constraints, she was often imagined as a potential threat to the social order.”

This exhibit gives insight into often forgotten Victorian ritual and manners and is underpinned by perhaps an even more important statement about our cultural reluctance to talk openly about death, except to licensed professionals: “We don’t have [grieving] rituals anymore. Ritual practice helps us give form to something we can’t articulate,” says Koda during the press preview of the show. “People needed this before therapists.”

If the cellist was the prologue here, I am still left to consider where this exhibit might conclude. It would be interesting to see how mourning garb translates into avant garde fashion, goth culture, and contemporary death ritual. The exhibit is simply an Anglo testament of mourning attire with much less depth than its opening performance might suggest, but it’s a good conversation starter.

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To place Melanie Schiff in the context of a staid photographic genre would be counterproductive to the poetic space her work inhabits. In her first solo show at Kate Werble Gallery in New York City, “Run, Falls,” she draws us into conversation with the light of Los Angeles — where she has lived since 2008 — and the way it bounces off windows, bends around form and reflects to create layered compositions.

Schiff’s work began as colorful still lifes born of parenthetical youth culture and prosaic inanimate objects: moody mise-en-scène self-portraits with beer bottles in the aftermath of a party scene; half-nude women playing in wild landscapes; references to iconic musicians and albums within images; meditations on light hitting unremarkable objects. She was recognized for it with inclusion in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Her current work is a negotiation of the manmade set against the natural environment in a motif that calls for a visceral sense of place in reimagined quotidian scenes. In the aesthetic tradition of photographers like James Welling — whose work is among the canon of post-conceptual Los Angeles artists — Schiff continues to experiment with her medium, elevating the photograph beyond the frozen moment, using multiple or long exposures, unexpected juxtapositions, and as in earlier work, a play with light refraction and reflection. But whereas Welling uses tools like colored gels to alter space and create layers on top of the found environment, Schiff gently intervenes, adding texture with tangible objects (a textile, a window), or using technical processes like motion blur to further manipulate space. Sometimes Schiff doesn’t interfere at all; she allows light to trace its path and reference form. She only gives the viewer the most palpable subject of the image in her titles, freeing the mind to experiment with an underlying narrative syntax that she beckons through movement and enduring heliacal energy.

Throughout Schiff’s series, textiles and manmade materials commingle with textures of natural objects. Sometimes waterfalls are overlaid with pattern: a blanket becomes backdrop to weeds, and multiple exposures of a tattooed dancer are an energetic force in an otherwise rigid industrial architectural environment. Those latter pictures, Double Dancer and Dancer and Broom (all 2014) call to mind and provide a contrasting reference to Imogen Cunningham’s portraits of dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham.

On the farthest wall of the gallery, Threadbare I and Threadbare II set the tone for Schiff’s work. The images, which are some of the only color works in the exhibit, are a foray into the artist’s muse: Southern California’s harsh, warm light, which emanates through and peeks around worn oriental rugs. And perhaps by curatorial decision, environmental light is reflected a second time into the images: by light bouncing into the glass frames from the adjacent gallery door. While other reflections abound, smaller framed black-and-white landscapes spaced throughout the exhibit act as reference points, anchoring the series back to earth. There are works like Falls, which fits into the genre in a traditional sense, celebrating the watery life-force as portrait, and its counterpart, Triple Falls which is a suggestion of the same waterfall as an abstracted form approaching Cubism. There are less traditional landscapes too, like that of an image of a limb and its darkly clothed body written with light shining through a wicker chair. Where color shows up, it is overshadowed by the sun, which illuminates the composition, turning a monotone world into a spectrum myriad of hues.

A series orchestrated in a roving soliloquy that drifts between genres, Schiff makes work that’s an authentic representation of her social, geographic and solar environment. She plays with ubiquitous objects and asks us to consider their singular situational relevance, further eschewing boundaries set by formal elements of photography to reframe our expectations of narrative. In a time when a constant stream of imagery has the power to dilute conscious photographic practice and experimentation with process, Schiff’s work shines. Perhaps she gives us an escape, even if it’s simply in her own reflection; perhaps we just can’t avert our gaze from the sun.

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