archivesietsema

The Wide, Wide World of Paul Sietsema, Art History and Ephemera

Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street
212-708-9400
New York
The Paul J. Sachs Drawing Galleries, third floor
Paul Sietsema
September 30, 2009-
February 15, 2010

The Museum of Modern Art presents Paul Sietsema, the first New York exhibition of the artist’s most recent body of work. Sietsema’s films, drawings, and sculptures engage moments in art history and various genres of visual cataloguing. Out-of-print midcentury exhibition catalogues, archaeological manuals, and explorers’ diaries all provide visual source material for direct appropriation and a more subtle gleaning of editing, framing, and presentation styles. This exhibition features his third film, Figure 3 (2008), and drawings related to the film, including new works from the series on view for the first time, and selected works from MoMA’s collection. Paul Sietsema is organized by Connie Butler, The Robert Lehman Foundation Chief Curator of Drawings, The Museum of Modern Art.

Figure 3 grew out of Sietsema's collection of images documenting ethnographic objects from Africa, Indo-Asia, and the South Pacific region of Oceania. It reflects his particular interest in the ways these objects have been represented in different contexts, including anthropological photographs and museum displays. For the film, the artist reimagined various historical artifacts from diverse cultures and time periods as sculptures, then captured the handmade objects on 16mm film. The result is mostly black-and-white moving images that slip between abstraction and representation.

Sietsema’s Figure 3 drawings (2005-09), part of the same conceptual project as the film, create a similar tension between their physicality and the traces of their making. Many of the drawings were made with techniques adopted from predigital photo retouching and inkjet printing. The drawings capture a range of subjects, illustrating the marred surfaces of the artist’s workspace as well as carefully selected newspapers disrupted by paint splatters from the studio. Considered together, the drawings and film are an examination of the ways in which certain images are constructed and taken up into history.

Sietsema (American, b. 1968) lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his BA from University of California, Berkeley (1992) and MFA from UCLA (1999). He has had solo exhibitions at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid (2009), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (2008), de Appel arts centre, Amsterdam (2008), and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2003). He has also been included in a number of group exhibitions including Life on Mars: 55th Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art (2008), 5th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art (2008), and Le Mouvement des images at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2006). He is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2005) and a DAAD Artists-in-Residence Fellowship (2008).

The accompanying publication Paul Sietsema: Figure 3 situates the artist’s latest project in the broader context of his work of the past ten years and is illustrated with stills from Figure 3 and related drawings and objects. An essay by Connie Butler and an interview with the artist by Bruce Hainley, a contributing editor of Artforum. explore Sietsema’s unique approach to looking as well as the relationships between his drawings, object making, and film. Paul Sietsema: Figure 3 is published by The Museum of Modern Art and is distributed to the trade through Distributed Art Publishers (D.A.P) in the United States and Canada, and through Thames + Hudson outside North America. It is available at the MoMA Stores and online at MoMAstore.org. Paperback. 8 x 10 in.; 80 pp.; 50 ills. Price: $29.95. ISBN: 978-0-87070-776-6.

Paul Sietsema, Stack drawing, Detail, 2006, Cut-and-pasted painted paper and chalk on board, 32 x 31", Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fund for the Twenty-First Century, Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles, © 2007 Paul Sietsema, Photograph Joshua White.

Paul Sietsema, an Inventive Wedding of Sculpture and Film

Paul Sietsma, still from Empire, 2003, from Paul Sietsema: Empire, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, March 20-June 8, 2003.

Paul Sietsema, The Famous Last Words, 2006, Ink on folded paper, 62-3/16 x 48-1/16", Collection SFMOMA, Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles, © 2007 Paul Sietsema, Photograph Joshua White.

Paul Sietsema, Calendar Sticks, 2007, bamboo, paint, tape, paper, latex, staples, paper clip, string, urethane powder, and clay, 745 x 14 x 5", Courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles, © 2007 Paul Sietsema, Photograph Joshua White.

San Francisco Museum
of Modern Art
151 Third Street
(between Mission
and Howard streets)
415-357-4000
San Francisco
New Work: Paul Sietsema
March 28-June 22, 2008

Marked by conceptual acuity and material experimentation, Sietsema's process is deliberate, inventive, and multilayered. Identifying primarily with a sculptural practice, the artist uses film as a way to examine sculptural experience in relation to photo imagery. Sietsema's sculptural objects, made by hand and with exquisite attention to detail, derive from preexisting images. After creating the objects, he shoots them on 16 mm film. As the subjects migrate from an initial two-dimensional photo source to a three-dimensional sculptural object and finally to a cinematic, time-based medium, the artist investigates how different forms of representation affect our understanding of a subject.

New Work: Paul Sietsema debuts the artist's newest project, and is organized by SFMOMA Assistant Curator Apsara DiQuinzio. The exhibition features sculpture, drawings, and a 16 mm film that together shape an evocative, layered environment that fluctuates between presence and absence, historical time periods, and different cultures.

Sietsema's new project, for which he received a Guggenheim Foundation Grant in 2005, is undertaken in an open-ended spirit and uses diverse materials, technical processes, and formal properties to explore certain prehistoric cultures, such as Africa, Indo-Asia, and Oceania. Sietsema began the work by collecting images of early artifacts that typify the way the West perceives and is influenced by so-called primitive cultures. Initially springing from these 18th- and 19th-century documents, written and photographic, the project merges past and present, and points to a slippage between cultures, spaces, and objects. Because many of the indigenous civilizations addressed have been mostly lost through conflation of colonialism, industrialization, and modernization, their reception has been filtered and reorganized through Western perspectives. Of the project, the artist has said: "Many of the subjects I chose are to structure a kind of loss. The objects for me epitomize a certain kind of loss, one structured by, and in this case caused by, representation. The attempt to record and represent these cultures to the West has changed them."

The mostly black-and-white film (in progress) included in the exhibition features the dozens of objects Sietsema made based on images of rare cultural artifacts he has been compiling since 2001. He envisions these sculptures as utilitarian objects for an imagined person living on a remote island before the onset of Western exploration. The objects include a fishing net, a shield, a carrying bag, wrapping fiber, a fish-skin tunic, coins, and a waist ornament. In the film, they are presented against various backgrounds, and their treatment reflects Sietsema's consideration of object photography, material experimentation, and museum display methods. The images slip in and out of identification, as Sietsema experiments with abstract and figurative vocabularies.

Sietsema has also made a related series of black-and-white drawings — experiments with pre-digital, photo-retouching methods such as stencils, sprayed ink, and built-up layers of ink. Though entirely constructed by hand, the drawings were made with processes meant to emulate those of mechanical reproduction. The Famous Last Words (2006), an example from this series and part of SFMOMA's collection, presents an image of a text composed of passages written by the artist as well as sections appropriated from sources ranging from Belgian poet Henri Michaux to Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyerdahl. Seamlessly woven together, the fragments form a singular diaristic account of an anonymous individual, partly embodied by the artist, living on an imagined island. The drawing encapsulates the dynamic reconstructive thrust of Sietsema's project, while conveying our inherent urge to want to know (or visually read) a subject that has in essence become illegible over time. This drawing, along with the other works in the project, exemplifies what the artist describes as "the tension between the yearning for a primary direct view of a lost culture / time, and the impossibility of this view."

Sietsema (b. 1968) lives and works in Los Angeles, where he received an MFA from UCLA in 1999. Over the past eight years, he has produced a small, sought-after body of work represented in museum collections worldwide, including Centre Pompidou, in Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art, in Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, in New York; Tate Modern, in London; Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York; among others. He has been included in a number of significant group exhibitions in recent years, including Uncertain States of America (Astrup Fernley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, 2005), Ecstasy: In and About Altered States (MOCA, Los Angeles, 2006), and The Americans: New Art (Barbican Art Galleries, London, 2001). His most notable project to date was Empire (2002-3), also consisting of a 16 mm film, sculptural objects, photographs, and drawings.

Paul Sietsema, Chinese Porcelain, 2007, Ink on paper, 44 x 68 x 1.5".