Autor: Paul Sietsema (Artist); Nora Abrams; Michael Ned Holte; Sarah Sheridan

Editorial Mousse Publishing

Nora Burnett Abrams, ed., texts by Michael Ned Holte, Sarah Robaio Sheridan, and Nora Burnett Abrams. 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.” Los Angeles–based artist Paul Sietsema (born 1968) compounds organic and artificial detritus in his artwork. Using photographs and other objects that reference specific bodies of knowledge as starting points for his carefully crafted drawings and sculptures, he then films these images and objects, arranging and comparing both the physical works and the ideas, information and knowledge associated with them. Through his multistep, multimedia approach, Sietsema explores what it means to make art today, amid the barrage of images and the telescoping of past, present and future that instant access to information seems to provide. His film projects are both a consideration of time and how we apprehend it and an effort to return significance to the activity of image-making in an age of digital immediacy. This slim, clothbound hardcover is the first publication on Sietsema's film works, and includes stills from seven films accompanied by three curatorial essays.