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Drawing Room presents a major solo exhibition by Paul Sietsema. The
exhibition will include two new films, drawings and paintings previously
unseen in the UK.
Sietsema's artworks reveal an interest in the
materiality of objects and images combined with a more conceptualised
concern with the legacies of past eras of cultural history and the
contextualisation of artefacts, the process of image making and changing
conceptions of what constitutes material.
Sietsema has said:
Drawing has always been the beginning and, perhaps, the end of every
project I make. Not making sketches per se but investigating the
relationships between imagery, form, and material that dominate in our
mediated experience in the world.
In a series of four
sailboat drawings, Calendar boat 1, 2, 3 and 4, the
repeated 'frames', with their stilled image and subtle, non-linear
transformations to the palette, pay homage to stasis, a quality of
structuralist film that informs much of Sietsema's practice. To
duplicate the image, Sietsema has employed techniques borrowed from
pre-digital manuals for touching up photographs. Using latex to mask
out sections of the image, he has employed this restoration technique to
build the image bit by bit from a blank sheet of paper, effectively making
the image in reverse.
Blue Square 1 and Blue
Square 2 (2012) take as their subjects a torn sheet of paper and a
broken frame. Sietsema has rendered, editing as he does so, the creases,
tears and scuffs of the blue backing paper. The abstract lines on the
accompanying picture are formed from the broken frame parts. In this
work abstraction—the square of the paper, the lines of the
wood—collide with representation—the rendered sheet of paper
and partly dismembered frame.
A new series of enamel works on
reclaimed canvas present arrangements of objects relating to clichéd
ideas of work in the classical studio, such as paint-filled brushes,
spilled paint, and a hammer, chisel and nails captured in a pool of paint.
These are photographed and the area the paint pool defines is digitally
clipped from its background. The manipulated image is then painted in
enamel onto the found canvas support. The inevitable slippages and
miss-registers that result from a combination of analogue and digital
techniques add to the ambiguity of the image and the process of
production.
Film is the medium that pulls together the
various lines of enquiry that inform Sietsema's practice. Telegraph
(2012) is composed of a series of photographs of splintered wood arranged
to form a letter of the alphabet, which, over the course of the film reads:
L/E/T/T/E/R T/O A Y/O/U/N/G P/A/I/N/T/E/R. Whilst the process of making a
digital film is mostly imperceptible, the mechanical quality of this 16mm
film is made palpable as its technology is redundant in current information
exchange. The broken wood serves the same function as the frame fragments
in Blue square 1 and Blue square 2; the heightened material
nature has a very concrete, physical quality that might engender a
phenomenological response and work against the intellectual activity of
assembling language.
Paul Sietsema (born 1968)
lives and works in Los Angeles and Berlin. He has exhibited widely and has
had solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Basel (2012), Cubitt, London (2010),
Museum of Modern Art, New York (2009), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina
Sofia, Madrid (2009), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2008), Whitney
Museum of American Art, New York (2003) His work was also included in the
last Carnegie International in Pittsburgh (2008) and in the 5th Berlin
Biennial (2008).
Talk:
Wednesday 19
September, 6–7pm
Paul Sietsema in-conversation with Jonas
Žakaitis (Tulips & Roses)
Booking essential: paulsietsema.eventbrite.com
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