• Thomas Dane is delighted to announce an exhibition of Amie Siegel’s new large-scale moving image work, Bloodlines, and an associated series of prints, Cloude, Clot and Cloot (all 2022), at the London gallery beginning 27 April, 2022. Siegel’s layered, meticulously constructed works embrace moving image, installation, photography, painting, and performance to trace and perform the undercurrents of systems of value, cultural ownership and image-making.

  • Filmed in numerous private estates throughout England and Scotland, as well as in public institutions, Bloodlines follows the movement of...
    Bloodlines, 2022, 4K video, colour/sound, 82 min [still]

    Filmed in numerous private estates throughout England and Scotland, as well as in public institutions, Bloodlines follows the movement of paintings by English artist George Stubbs (1724-1806) from aristocratic homes and private country houses to an exhibition in a public art gallery, then back again. First depicted within the lavish decor and stillness of the stately home interiors, the paintings take on a new presence when installed by museum workers on gallery walls and seen by a viewing public. 

  • Bloodlines exemplifies Siegel’s understated formal precision, revealing systems of class and inherited wealth and subtly suggesting colonialism’s role in establishing and perpetuating their structures. Offering an intimate look into the world of cultural property and the ownership of heritage, the film explores distinctions between private and public realms, and the labour (and leisure) that maintains each. Through the iterative and conceptual quality of Siegel’s work, Bloodlines conveys a rich constellation of images and ideas and sets up a narrative that unfolds associatively in the viewer’s consciousness. Motifs such as flowers, fireplaces, wallpaper, dogs, horses, and other creatures and patterns of action build and echo throughout the film, accruing meaning. Time, too, becomes both subject and material in the uncannily immutable settings of each home. Distinctions between their interior and exterior worlds, the absence and presence of people; stillness and movement; animate beings and inanimate objects; images of past and present; reality and artifice, all are brought to the fore. A sense of empathy is conveyed, as viewers encounter a cast of both human and animal protagonists.  

  • Bloodlines, 2022 [still] (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Bloodlines, 2022 [still] (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Bloodlines, 2022 [still] (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Bloodlines, 2022 [still] (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Bloodlines, 2022 [still]
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  • In the print series Cloude, Clot and Cloot (2022), Siegel combines details of the sky as portrayed in several of...

    Cloot, 2022, inkjet print, 35.2 x 50.8 cm

    In the print series Cloude, Clot and Cloot (2022), Siegel combines details of the sky as portrayed in several of the Stubbs oil paintings featured within Bloodlines. The puffs and veils of cloud, atmosphere, and greenery in the prints are reproduced at one-to-one scale to the original works, suggesting a gathering of imagery that is instantaneous—like the weather—and, just as artworks that come together for exhibition only to drift apart again, combine to produce new meanings from their unexpected juxtapositions and proximity.

  • In conversation: Amie Siegel with Adrian Searle at ICA London

    Wednesday 22 June, 7pm

     

    Amie Siegel will be in conversation with Adrian Searle, art critic at The Guardian newspaper, discussing Bloodlines (2022).

     

    Institute of Contemporary Arts

    The Mall
    London SW1Y 5AH

    Click here to book

     

     

    Bloodlines is a commission of the National Galleries of Scotland with support from Art Fund and the Contemporary Art Society, and with additional production support from Princess Grace Foundation, New York, and PALOMAR. Bloodlines is also currently on display at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern One), Edinburgh, until 4 September 2022. 

  • Amie Siegel (b. 1974, Chicago, IL) works variously between film, video, photography, performance and installation. Recent solo exhibitions include Medium...

    Amie Siegel (b. 1974, Chicago, IL) works variously between film, video, photography, performance and installation. Recent solo exhibitions include Medium Cool, Blaffer Art Museum, Houston; Winter Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; Strata, South London Gallery; Ricochet, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart; Double Negative, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich; Provenance, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Her work is in public collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern; Whitney Museum of American Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Siegel has been a fellow of the DAAD Berliner-Künstlerprogramm and the Guggenheim Foundation and is a 2021 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award recipient. Siegel lives in New York City.

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