Published in conjunction with Sietsema’s show at Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Seven Films by Paul Sietsema is the first publication devoted to the artist’s films. In the words of Sarah Robayo Sheridan, “Paul Sietsema compounds organic and artificial detritus in all his artwork, scavenging in history’s wake to identify specific tools of cultural production and foraging for concepts of art promulgated in the words of artists and attitudes of critics. He mines film as a vestige, the medium of the mechanical age, pressing and squeezing its very obsolescence through a contemporary sieve. In so doing, the artist hovers in the switchover between a bodily inscription in the image and a fundamental reconstitution of sight and representation in the matrix of the virtual. Where body stops and image starts is a divide collapsing through a series of innovations and accidents that go back as far as the people of Pompeii trapped in an emulsion that marked their death, but which paradoxically carried forward their image into eternity. ”

 

Other: Paul Sietsema
Text by: Michael Ned Holte, Sarah Sheridan