Amie Siegel: Winter
April 12 - May 10, 2014
2831A Mission Street San Francisco, CA 94110 USA
Opening reception: Saturday, April 12, 5 – 8pm
Gallery hours: Tuesday– Friday, 11 – 6pm
Live performances every Saturday from 12 – 4pm
Ratio 3 is pleased to announce Winter, its first exhibition with Amie Siegel. Featuring a large-scale video installation, accompanying performances, and a new series of photographic works, this exhibition marks the North American debut of Siegel’s 33-minute film, Winter (2013). Live performances score the projected film, providing a soundtrack that changes with each performance iteration, suggesting a non-linear progression from production to exhibition. In Siegel’s installation, spaces of production, performance, and spectacle merge and interchange, unhinging the fixity of the film medium.
Eschewing narrative and causal explanation, Winter suggests a future state of cultural and environmental instability. Establishing shots of luminescent waterways and desolate landscapes evoke global warming and nuclear disaster, hinting at a catastrophic prologue to the film’s setting. Shot in the white-washed, biomorphic dwellings of New Zealand architect Ian Athfield, Winter’s characters inhabit an unspecified temporal space. Architecture and props— from bubble skylights and cedar-beamed roofs to outmoded audio equipment and woven basketry— appear simultaneously futuristic and historical. As the characters move through domestic spaces and explore the outside world, the film’s interiors and exteriors become psychologically reflective of its characters. These spaces, like the mannerisms and actions of their inhabitants, allude to both an unknowable future and an unrecoverable past.
Conceived as both film and performance, Winter’s soundtrack will be performed live every Saturday. With every repetition the experience of viewing the film changes radically; each screening is scored by Siegel with a different combination of instrumentalists, vocalists, and voiceover actors. Staged around areas for musicians, foley sound, a recording booth and a live mixing table, the main gallery becomes an installation of multiple tenses— shot in the recent past, speculating on the future, and changing in the present with each rendition of the soundtrack.
In the gallery’s second exhibition space, Siegel’s photographs of radioactive minerals echo the film’s captivating yet ominous depiction of landscape and environment. These minerals resemble asteroids, maps, or totemic shards— uncanny objects radiating lives of their own. Photographed in darkness, the fluorescing uranium emits radiation and light, oscillating between visible and invisible threat.
Amie Siegel (b, 1974, Chicago) lives and works in New York. Her multi-element works, including photographs, video installation and feature films, have been exhibited at MoMA/PS1, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; MAXXI, Rome; Hayward Gallery, London: Kunst-Werke, Berlin; Kunstmuseum Stuttgart; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; and the 5th Auckland Triennial in New Zealand, curated by Hou Hanru. Her films have shown at the Cannes Film Festival, Berlin International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. Siegel has been a fellow of the DAAD Berliner-Künstlerprogramm, Guggenheim Foundation, and is the recipient of the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston’s Foster Prize (2010), and a Sundance Institute Film Fund award (2012).