Amie Siegel: Panorama
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
22 September 2023–11 February 2024

Opening and Artist Toast: Thursday 21 September, 6–8pm

Amie Siegel: Panorama opens this week at Carnegie Museum of Art: an exhibition tracing the complex processes of how cultural materials—once living—enter a museum collection and begin their afterlife as objects of display. The exhibition features the New York-based artist’s new film, Panorama (2023), commissioned by Carnegie Museum of Art.

Amie Siegel’s work often focuses on making visible the behind-the-scenes, often unconscious operations of complex systems that investigate how value is constructed as her protagonists—archaeological artefacts, furniture, paintings, physical objects, materials and labour—move from one context to another, one time period to another. In the artist’s new film Panorama (2023), she reveals the processes, mechanisms, technologies, and hidden narratives of museum expeditions and displays by connecting moving images across multiple decades and geographies. Siegel’s research brought to light a trove of dormant 16mm film reels found in the Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s storage that document scientific expeditions dating from the 1930s to 1970s. In Panorama, Siegel uses these source films of specimen field collection and creation of the museum’s dioramas, along with her own contemporary footage, to create an entirely new, autonomous work of art.

Panorama uncovers a space of artifice and illusion at the Natural History Museum, offering a cinematic window into the mammal, bird, and botany habitats on view, as well as a glimpse into the minds and cultural practices of the scientists and technicians who created them. Alongside her film, Siegel presents an arrangement she refers to as a “city of plinths”— an array of objects from the Carnegie Museum of Art’s decorative arts collection depicting flora and fauna. Siegel’s re-contextualisation of these once functional, now vitrined items, draws a parallel to how once dynamic, living animals become objects.

Amie Siegel: Panorama is organised by Liz Park, Richard Armstrong Curator of Contemporary Art, with Cynthia Stucki, Curatorial Assistant for Contemporary Art and Photography.

Amie Siegel: Panorama
22 September 2023–11 February 2024

Carnegie Museum of Art
4400 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh
PA 15213

A Panorama on ‘Panorama’: A conversation between Amie Siegel and Filipa Ramos
Thursday 1 February 2024, 6.30 pm
Carnegie Museum of Art Theater

To coincide with the exhibition, Amie Siegel will be in conversation with writer Filipa Ramos, discussing Siegel's new work, and the relationship between the cultural histories and traditions that brought together the medium of film, the Western practices of research, and the methods of collectionism.