Paul Sietsema:

Films and Works

Los Angeles-based artist Paul Sietsema’s films, paintings, and drawings engage with contemporary issues of art production, consumption, and proliferation. Paul Sietsema: Films and Works featured four films, Empire (2002), Figure 3 (2008), Encre Chine (2012), and Anticultural Positions (2009), which deal with the idea of constructed histories and address theories of visual perception and image construction. The issues engaged in these films range from a history of various avant-gardes through the aesthetics of those movements, to the anthropological objects that spurred the development of the first museums, to a merging of the subject and physicality of film as a material, to an investigation of the studio as the site of production through an appropriated lecture modified to describe Sietsema’s practice. This exhibition also featured Sietsema’s paintings and drawings, which often depict the tools and materials used to produce his artworks. They involve a multilayered process of production beginning with encasing groupings of tools and objects from the studio in thick layers of paint on newspaper and capturing a digital image of the resulting objects. The image file is then manipulated and used as the basis for a “copy,” which is painted using various hand-based techniques. This exhibition featured a group of such paint-on-tool constructions being shown for the first time.

Paul Sietsema was born in 1968 in Los Angeles, where he continues to live and work. Sietsema has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio; Kunsthalle Basel; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He was awarded a Wexner Center Residency Award in 2010, a DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) Fellowship in 2008, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005.