Vues/Views is a double-sided work comprised of a film and work on paper, a critical consideration of 19th-century French panoramic wallpapers animating interiors in the United States to this day. These proto-cinematic, handblocked papers frame the interior as exterior, unfolding views of distant places, mythologies, and histories in sequential horizontal tableaux. They allow the viewer’s gaze to travel without leaving the room, creating a voyeuristic expedition, replete with issues of exoticization and otherness, domination and control.
Vues/Views traces such “panoramic papers” in homes across the United States, including Zuber’s Les vues d’Amérique du Nord (Views of North America): a pastiche of imagined pre-civil war tableaux 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 the country’s past and present, culminating in the White House. Collaborations with artists and performers - including Alcorn State University’s Sounds of Dyn-O-Mite; Davóne Tines; and Joe Baker (Lenape, Delaware Tribe of Indians) reflect on the wallpaper’s social implications, giving voice to multiple perspectives.
The verso work-on-paper is culled from discarded scenic panoramic rolls the artist 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.