18.9.24 - Amie Siegel ‘Asterisms’ at VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art, Ireland
VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art presents a solo exhibition of Amie Siegel, featuring a selection of works including the moving-image installation Asterisms (2021).
Asterisms is a sculptural film installation, a uniquely star-shaped wall of overlapping images re-scaled by the artist in response to VISUAL's Main Gallery. An asterism is a loose collection of stars that form a pattern. This notion of disparate elements combining to form a complete image is key to both Asterisms itself, and to Siegel's practice, in which deep research produces artworks that address cultural, political and social questions.
Asterisms unfolds in the United Arab Emirates. Images of factories, labour, ecology, artificial islands, humans, and animals hide in plain sight, simultaneously visible and invisible. The artist's careful montage interweaves these elements– various cinematically-scaled geometries that build and layer over time, both in their accumulation of meaning and as the images dynamically overlap and connect on the star-shaped wall.
RM #1-21 (2014) is a photographic series of radioactive minerals. These works allude to Asterisms in their constellation-like display, individually illuminated in a darkened space, and in each image's astral representation, glowing gently in dark matter. Siegel's photographs include pseudomorphs, or “false forms”, when one mineral's substance is replaced by another while retaining its outward appearance.
Alongside these works Siegel presents Listening to the Universe (2014), a work-on-paper and act of montage derived from the artist's collection of space museum postcards, presenting the vacuum of sound that is outer space, and our continual efforts to listen, or know, our sphere and beyond.
Asterisms is a commission of the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil and VIA Art Fund. Additional support by KTLO, Los Angeles.
Amie Siegel
Asterisms
20 September 2024–19 January 2025
VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art
Old Dublin Road
Carlow Town
Ireland Further information
Asterisms is a sculptural film installation, a uniquely star-shaped wall of overlapping images re-scaled by the artist in response to VISUAL's Main Gallery. An asterism is a loose collection of stars that form a pattern. This notion of disparate elements combining to form a complete image is key to both Asterisms itself, and to Siegel's practice, in which deep research produces artworks that address cultural, political and social questions.
Asterisms unfolds in the United Arab Emirates. Images of factories, labour, ecology, artificial islands, humans, and animals hide in plain sight, simultaneously visible and invisible. The artist's careful montage interweaves these elements– various cinematically-scaled geometries that build and layer over time, both in their accumulation of meaning and as the images dynamically overlap and connect on the star-shaped wall.
RM #1-21 (2014) is a photographic series of radioactive minerals. These works allude to Asterisms in their constellation-like display, individually illuminated in a darkened space, and in each image's astral representation, glowing gently in dark matter. Siegel's photographs include pseudomorphs, or “false forms”, when one mineral's substance is replaced by another while retaining its outward appearance.
Alongside these works Siegel presents Listening to the Universe (2014), a work-on-paper and act of montage derived from the artist's collection of space museum postcards, presenting the vacuum of sound that is outer space, and our continual efforts to listen, or know, our sphere and beyond.
Asterisms is a commission of the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil and VIA Art Fund. Additional support by KTLO, Los Angeles.
Amie Siegel
Asterisms
20 September 2024–19 January 2025
VISUAL Centre for Contemporary Art
Old Dublin Road
Carlow Town
Ireland Further information