FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
REGEN PROJECTS
629 North Almont Drive
Los Angeles, CA 90069
Tel. (310) 276-5424 Fax. (310) 276-7430
Paul Sietsema: Empire
September 7 – October 12, 2002
Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday 11:00 AM-5:00 PM
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 7th, 6:00-8:00 PM
Regen Projects is pleased to announce an exhibition by Paul Sietsema. The exhibition will feature a 16mm film titled, Empire. The film's point of departure is Sietsema's sculptural investigation of the art critic, Clement Greenberg's New York apartment, constructed from a photograph reproduced in a 1964 issue of Vogue magazine. The film consists of a series of segments each focusing on a different spatial model constructed by Sietsema: Greenberg’s room as the historical space of Modernist painting’s heyday, a heavily ornamented rococo interior from the Hotel de Soubise in Paris, a translucent crystalline formation, a geometric matrix, abstract frames of pure color, a cavernous seemingly organic space modeled after a Louise Bourgeois work and one of the only known examples of a sculpture by Jackson Pollock, and a still life of a grasshopper – its wings and legs mimicking the leaves and branches on which it rests.
Empire “meditates on specific objects, the spaces and moments in which they exist, and the beautiful complexity of how they begin to radiate and connect to other things. … Sietsema's faithful sculptural re-creation[s] of the space[s] for his film push verisimilitude over some edge so that it becomes delirious, liberatory. … Sietsema ponders through film the conceptual dynamics of how sights are seen, how space and the things in it come to be experienced, and how such experiences are theorized and/or constructed (as history, as "fact"). … Sietsema illuminates the way objects in space and time are more than just the intersection of ornament (rococo filigree/modernist streamlining) and structural support (materials, space, history). What he is filming is the daydream of culture, opening up and proposing so many connections that everything begins to fall apart. In that loose, gorgeous falling apart, when things become both what they are and what they're not, the beauty part begins."
(Hainley, Bruce. Towards a Funner Laocoon. Artforum. Summer 2000.)
Paul Sietsema lives and works in Los Angeles. He received an MFA from UCLA in 1999. Sietsema's work was included in "The Americans: New Art" at the Barbican Art Galleries in London, "Sonsbeek 9" curated by Jan Hoet in Arnhem, The Netherlands, "00" at Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York, and "L.A." at Galerie Monika Spruth & Philomene Magers in Cologne. An artist’s book titled, Construction of Vision was published last year in conjunction with the “Sonsbeek 9” exhibition.
A reception for the artist will take place at the gallery on Saturday, September 7 from 6:00 to 8:00 PM. For further information please contact Shaun Caley Regen or Lisa Overduin at the gallery at (310) 276-5424.
UPCOMING:
Lawrence Weiner
October 19 – November 23, 2002