| Paul Sietsema is an artist deeply engaged in the act of looking. His ethereal drawings, sculptures, and films explore combinations of color, space, and movement through subjects spanning a broad geographic and temporal range. For his third and newest project, Figure 3 (2008), Sietsema takes as his inspiration the pre-colonial ethnographic objects found in various locations—including Africa, Indo-Asia, and the South Pacific region of Oceania—that he has collected since 2001.He re-imagines these objects through his own drawings and sculptures, then captures the sculptures on 16mm film; the results are flickering, mostly black-and-white moving images that slip between abstract and figurative representation. |  |
Arhan Vovvani
Paul Sietsema is an artist deeply engaged in the act of looking. His ethereal drawings, sculptures, and films explore combinations of color, space, and movement through subjects spanning a broad geographic and temporal range. For his third and newest project, Figure 3 (2008), Sietsema takes as his inspiration the pre-colonial ethnographic objects found in various locations—including Africa, Indo-Asia, and the South Pacific region of Oceania—that he has collected since 2001. He re-imagines these objects through his own drawings and sculptures, then captures the sculptures on 16mm film; the results are flickering, mostly black-and-white moving images that slip between abstract and figurative representation.
Situating Figure 3 in the broader context of Sietsema’s work of the past ten years, this far-ranging volume explores the artist’s unique approach to looking as well as the relationships among his drawings, object-making, and film. Playing with the mutability and mediation of meaning, Sietsema’s project Oceania (2001–ongoing) looks at artifacts from the South Pacific and links them to Western art movements such as post-Minimalism or the German collective November Gruppe. Taking the form of a 16mm film, as well as silk screens, mixed-media sculpture, collages, and text-based drawings, this anthropological study completes the trilogy of films that began with Untitled (Beautiful Place) (1998) and followed with Empire (2002). Sietsema’s work is fascinated by context—both of place (Empire, for example, shows canonical Abstract Expressionist works installed in the formalist critic Clement Greenberg’s apartment) and of time—but, above all, by the moment when context unravels.
