Paul Sietsema’s multilayered, multimedia work explores how many bodies of knowledge—about history, culture, and art itself—are far more fluid and mutable than we assume them to be.
 
He highlights the ambiguities of authorship and the ways aesthetics and understandings are often tied to specific cultures or historical periods, often using virtuosic tromp l’oeil effects and minute variations among repeated motifs. This exhibition is the most comprehensive to date for the artist, who lives and works in Los Angeles. It brings together five films—Figure 3 (2008), Anticultural Positions (2009), Telegraph and Encre chine (both 2012), and an as yet untitled new work (2013)—along with drawings, paintings, and other works on paper.
 
Since the late 1990s, Sietsema has created several in-depth, multimedia investigations, each combining a 16mm film presentation with other artworks. For example, in the film Figure 3, Sietsema took as his subject precolonial ethnographic objects and tools, primarily from the South Pacific. These objects served as inspiration for a series of highly detailed sculptures—incorporating materials such as plaster and printing ink—which Sietsema then captured on 16mm film. In its presentation of the sculptures, the film resembles an ethnographic documentary, highlighting Sietsema’s fascination with methods of cataloguing and classification while blurring the line between different eras of cultural and historical authorship. Anticultural Positions (2009), originally presented as a “lecture” at the New School in New York, intersperses close-ups of the working surfaces in Sietsema’s studio with original and appropriated text, emphasizing the site of production in his practice.
 
Telegraph and Encre chine were first shown together during Sietsema’s 2012 exhibition at the Kunsthalle Basel in Basel, Switzerland. In Telegraph, Sietsema utilizes different configurations of found wood scraps—from his studio and the street, and from the wreckage left in the wake of Hurricane Katrina—to investigate systems of communication stripped to essentials. At the forefront of Encre chine are frames, brushes, a camera, and other artists’ tools covered in black ink, an interference that explores the deterioration of objects through mediation and the intersection of the tools and products of art.
 
The new film, which is premiering at the Wexner Center, and projects related to it represent the culmination of Sietsema’s work supported by a Wexner Center Artist’s Residency Award in visual arts for 2010–11. Built around a spare and repetitive structure, this new film examines a space in which contemporary means of communication and media consumption have been replaced by highly clichéd and anachronistic versions of these same objects. The film presents a further meditation on the workspace of the artist, exploring ideas of artistic process, the nature of media, and the relationship between the present moment and the time captured and replayed by film.
 
The exhibition’s curator is Christopher Bedford, former chief curator of exhibitions at the Wexner Center and now Henry and Lois Foster Director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University. A richly illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition. It features essays by Suzanne Hudson (assistant professor, Department of Art History, University of Southern California) and George Baker (associate professor, Department of Art History, University of California, Los Angeles) and a conversation among Sietsema, Bedford, and Bill Horrigan, curator at large at the Wexner Center.
 
The exhibition travels to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, where it will be on view September 7, 2013, through January 5, 2014.

Shimon Attie’s MetroPAL.IS., an immersive, multiple-channel video installation, dramatically tackles the complex and intensely problematic Middle East conflict with characters cast from the Palestinian and Israeli communities in New York City. Dressed in outfits that reflect their varied lifestyles and professions, each of the performers reads from a document created by Attie that combines sections of the Israeli Declaration of Independence (1948) and the Palestinian Declaration of Independence (1988). This hybrid document reveals a surprisingly significant overlap between the two original texts.
 
Eight 65-inch (vertical) monitors encircle viewers with one larger-than-life-size character on each screen. The characters appear in poses reminiscent of baroque painting, with an almost orchestral flow of sound and text among them, enhancing the dramatic impact of the work. The complex editing and post-production work integral to creating this symphony of voices and the interaction among the individual monitors was completed during Attie’s residency as a visiting artist in the Wex’s Film/Video Studio Program in 2010.
 
Throughout Attie’s career, his work has focused on the formative aspects of communities, drawing on history, memories, and the significance of place. In recent years, his practice has shifted away from the projection of historic imagery on public architecture, turning towards ambitious, multichannel installations, such as MetroPAL.IS. Attie notes that video, as a time-based format, “lends itself to the kinds of conflation of past and present which is central to my work. In addition, creating multiple-channel, immersive works allow me to activate a given space, which is also something central to my artistic sensibility.”
 
A free gallery guide with an essay by Jennifer Lange, curator of the Film/Video Studio Program and of this exhibition, accompanies the show.
 
MetroPAL.IS. was commissioned by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum.