Steven Siegel

Siegel's site-specific public works fall into three broad categories: time-bound, outdoor newspaper structures; organic, linear works primarily made with shredded rubber; and large cubes or spheres of bound waste materials, often crushed plastic or aluminum containers.

Siegel's newspaper works generally take monolithic, concentrated forms, such as cylinders, hives, walls or towers. They reference time through their layers of dated newsprint, methodical reiterative construction process, and gradual disintegration.[1][5] Siegel's first fully realized such work was New Geology #2 (1992), a newspaper, stone and flora installation in the woods near his home in Milan, New York. It was undertaken as an experiment in change, decay and rebirth, and by 2000, had largely disappeared into a landscape of overgrown vegetation.[17] Hood (Portland, 1993) was a thirteen-foot, cone-shaped sculpture topped by colorful flora, whose distinct layers were created by alternating placement of newspaper folds in or out.[20] Siegel constructed Squeeze II (1998, Appalachian State University) from old school newspapers and sod, wedging an undulating structure between a grove of hemlocks, the organic curves creating a dialogue with the site's rolling hills.[30][28] For Very Slow (1999, Art Omi), he constructed two newspaper towers in a stand of maple trees.[15][17]

Later newspaper works include "Scale" (2002, Abington Art Center),[29] Stories of Katrina (2005, Montalvo Arts Center),[7] Bridge 2 (2009, Arte Sella, Italy),[13] Suncheon Weave (2016, Korea), and Hill and Valley (2015, Sculpture in the Wild, Lincoln, MT), his largest newspaper piece.[3][5][31][19] Writers have noted the cyclical "lifespan" of such works, from material origins in paper produced from trees, to art returned to the landscape, through biodegradation by fungi, mushrooms and molds into soil from which new trees grow.[3][7]

Steven Siegel, Like a Buoy, like a Barrel, plastics, 2019, Providence, RI, USA.

While the integration of Siegel's newspaper works blur boundaries between natural and constructed forms, his linear installations using rubber suggest organic, sometimes menacing intrusions into architectural settings.[32][1][33][26] The indoor work Repose (1997, Atlanta) consisted of a dark mound of shredded tires atop a shale-like stack of juice cartons that twisted through a large exhibition space.[34][35] For Carbon String (2001, Neuberger Museum of Art), he created a slender, playful 200-foot organic form that incongruously snaked its way through the otherwise austere architectural plaza of SUNY Purchase.[26][1][33] The rubber tentacle or tree-root-like forms of Carbon (2013, Canberra, Australia)—Siegel's largest permanent public work—ooze from a soffit and across the façade of a multi-use building once home to Australia's Department of Climate Change.[36][19]

In other installations, Siegel created works in contrast to landscaped and idyllic sites that suggested both minimalist sculpture and functional objects such as collections of material en route to being recycled.[25][1][37] For example, Bale (2001, University of Virginia) was a ten-foot, minimalist cube of crushed plastic bottles strapped together with rubber hose.[37] Similar installations included Can Can (Bowling Green State University, 2002), a warped sphere of bound aluminum can discards; E-virus (2006, Stanford University), a cylinder formed from electronic waste; cubes of Grass Paper Glass (2006, Grounds For Sculpture), and Like a Buoy, like a Barrel (2019, Providence, RI), among others.[25][8][14][38]

In the 2000s, Siegel shifted his emphasis to studio work, producing abstract work inspired by evolutionary processes that ranged from intimate sculpture to ambitious multimedia installations.[28][31][9] This work relates to his large-scale outdoor work in its continued use of postconsumer materials and evolving processes of incremental accumulation and craft that build to larger wholes.[8][28] In 2001, he exhibited small wall and tabletop pieces compressing stone, discarded paper, shredded rubber, and tree bark and branches into forms suggesting nests, flora and rock formations.[28]

Steven Siegel, Zelig from "Wonderful Life", mixed media, 68" x 84" x 24", 2008.

This work developed into “Wonderful Life” (2002–8), a chronological series of 52 wall pieces made with a limited range of materials that were partly inspired by and titled after Stephen Jay Gould's book of the same name, which reassessed evolutionary theory.[6][14] The series replicates the detail and diversity of natural life, progressing from simple to more elaborate and sophisticated forms.[39] However, rather than imitate results in nature, Siegel appropriated its methodology, exploring simple, cumulative changes in "evolution" (i.e., the refinement of technique) that generate form from generation to generation (work to work).[8][2][39] Critic John Perreault noted a key difference from Siegel's nearly monochromatic newspaper works, describing the series' "garish, contrasting, almost pop colors" as "not necessarily joyous [but] both exuberant and menacing."[8]

During this time, Siegel also produced large-scale indoor installations. He created Collection (2001) for an exhibition of work responding to the Fresh Kills Landfill; The New York Times described its mountain of household rubbish—catalogued by descriptive lists provided by people who donated the items tacked on an opposite wall—as both poetry and an "impressive simulation" of a dumpsite.[27] For Did God Make a Worm? (2005, Ingolstadt, Germany), Siegel used 9,000 pounds of donated aluminum Audi body-part rejects to create a giant, slug-like form that jutted from a wall and sprawled across and around a gallery space and its columns.[7]

Biography (2008–13) draws on elements of Siegel's intimate pieces and large installations, combining dense, intricately woven detail, diverse postconsumer materials, and an epic, undulating horizontal sweep.[40] At 156 feet long, the mixed-media wall piece has only been viewed in large sections (of up to 100 feet) exhibited at Marlborough (2011, 2013) and the Albany Airport (2018– ) or digitally, via composite photographs.[9][41][19] Functioning as both a geologic and personal timeline, it was constructed organically from right to left without a fixed endpoint, using Siegel's characteristic strategies of accumulation, compression and transformation.[2][3][5] Writers have compared it in scale and density to the Abstract expressionist paintings of Jackson Pollock and the Pop assemblages of Nancy Rubins, and visually, to shifting landscape tectonics, a vast topographical map, or DNA.[41][9] Artforum's Allese Thomson Baker wrote, "Siegel commands the detritus of our culture into a frantic rhythm, nailing contemporary anxieties about the environment to the wall. [He] may image our world out of rubbish, but the result is ravishing, glittering, and glistening in all its synthetic, inorganic wonder."[9]

Since 2013, Siegel has produced large collages and films combining photography, object-making and digital manipulation as an alternative format for his large studio work. These works employ both close-up and wide perspectives and multiple, grid-like screens. A Puzzle for Alice (2016) consists of 169 gridded wall panels, a master photograph and an eight-minute movie narrated by his wife, Alice, to whom it is dedicated.[3][42] Subsequent films include 35 Pieces (2017) and An Art Video (2018).[43]