Paul Sietsema Overview

Paul Sietsema is a sculptor of space whose "objects" are meditations on the ambiguity of vision and perception. He works primarily in film and sculpture—although he also makes collages, drawings, photographs, and books—fluctuating between three-dimensional objects and flat, moving images, between... [more]

Paul Sietsema is a sculptor of space whose "objects" are meditations on the ambiguity of vision and perception. He works primarily in film and sculpture—although he also makes collages, drawings, photographs, and books—fluctuating between three-dimensional objects and flat, moving images, between history and the present. Through these media, he consistently explores various combination of form, texture, color, space, and movement, with subjects that span a broad geographic and temporal range. In his most recent project, Figure 3 (2008) Sietsema takes indigenous ethnographic objects found in various locations, including the South Pacific region of Oceania prior to European colonization, and remakes them as sculptures that he then films. For the artist, building these sculptural investigations reflects his interest in immersing himself in the same ideas of cultural production and consumption that his work interrogates as well as in severing the objects from their historical associations. [show less]