Amie Siegel (Born 1974, Chicago, Illinois; active Brooklyn, New York) works in film, photography, and sculpture, investigating value, cultural ownership, and image making. Her double-sided work “Vues/Views,” comprised of a film and work on paper, is a critical consideration of the role of 19th-century French panoramic wallpapers animating interiors in the US to this day.
Amie Siegel, Installation of “Vues/Views” in Making HomeSmithsonian Design Triennial at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Photo: Elliot Goldstein © Smithsonian Institution
These proto-cinematic, handblocked papers frame the interior as exterior, unfolding views of distant places, mythologies, and histories in sequential horizontal tableaux. They also allow the viewer’s gaze to travel without leaving the room, creating a voyeuristic expedition of sorts, replete with issues of exoticization and otherness, domination and control. “Vues/Views” traces such “panoramic papers,” many of which are still produced today, in homes across the US, including Les vues d’Amérique du Nord (Views of North America, 1834) by French wallpaper manufacturer Zuber: a pastiche of imagined scenes of pre–Civil War life, as the nascent republic evolved from colony to colonial power.
In Siegel’s film, the wallpapers and their locations become a prism through which scenes of power, privilege, race, and class refract and converge, asking us to consider continuities between this country’s past and present. Collaborations with a range of fellow artists, communities, and participants reflect on the wallpaper’s social implications, giving voice to multiple perspectives. The artist’s verso panoramic is culled from discarded scenic rolls she found at the Zuber factory in France. Siegel reframes these moments of incompletion and absence to materially manifest the erasure and distortion that occur through the representations of people, landscapes, and cultures across time.
In collaboration with Davóne Tines, Alma Lee Gibbs Tines, and John Hilton Tines Sr.; Alcorn State University Sounds of Dyn-O-Mite Band; Joe Baker (Lenape, Delaware Tribe of Indians); James Coleman, Terrance Hamilton, Jua ‘Wan Lewis, Pendennis Club Friday regulars; and Dawn Heller. Producer Andrew Fierberg. Line Producers Christian Detres, Joe Serkoch. Production Coordinator Melissa Detres. Director of Photography Michelle Marrion. Steadicam Ben Spaner. First Assistants Camera Dietrich Teschner, Bridgett McQuillan, and Gary Walker. Camera Production Assistants Rachel Brown and Brent Acuna. Gaffer/Key Grip Bryan Edwards. Gaffer Ted Ayd. Key Grip Elliott Snell. Dolly Grip Alex Bond. Media Manager Robert Granata. Sound Recordists Taylor Packett and Marianna LaFollette. Music Recordist Ophir Paz. Editor Amie Siegel. Sound Mix Gisburg Smialek. Post-Production Coordinator Ina Ho. Wallpaper installation DecoRada Alan Rada, Anthony Ali, and Marco Dávila.
Thanks to Pierre Frey, Outset Contemporary Art Fund, and Thomas Dane Gallery. With support from Elise Jaffe and Jeffrey Brown, the Scott Collins Biennial Commission in partnership with Outset Contemporary Art Fund, Suzanne Deal Booth, Dillon and Ed Cohen and Blessing Way Foundation, Robert M. Rubin and Stéphane Samuel, Girlfriend Fund, and Foundation for Contemporary Arts.