siemon allen

TRANSITIONS

Two-person exhibition with Ledelle Moe
SMAC, Stellenbosch, South Africa
November 22, 2018 - February 23, 2019
smacgallery.com

Made on non-traditional industrial materials like polypropylene painter's plastic and spun agricultural cloth the drawings in this exhibition are a continuation of (and deviation from) my research based practice. Yet they reflect a renewed focus on direct mark-making and materiality. My studio practice has evolved out of a keen interest in how mass-produced items—newspapers, stamps, magazines, records—function as carriers of information and operate in the construction of national identity. I am an archivist in that I systematically accumulate these artifacts, which I ultimately catalogue, display or use as source material for architectural installations, large-scale digital prints, and drawings.

For the past three years I have been documenting aspects of the South African landscape using only an iPhone with its panorama feature. These casual photographs began initially as an exploration of key harbours—transitional geographic sites from where the interior of the country was initially colonised.

Subsequently while traveling across the country these explorations expanded into an informal archive of other types of coded landscapes. For example while on a recent residency at NIROX, I documented the grassy highveld at the Cradle of Humankind.

For me these casual photographs not only resonated with the charged history of South African landscape in art (from Baines to Pierneef and beyond) but also with notions of contested place. The romantic and problematic notion of the empty vista in this context is reexamined as an apprehensive fraught site full of ambiguities.

These photographic investigations eventually transformed into a series of large-scale drawings employing provisional and perhaps ephemeral materials such as Sharpie felt pens on polypropylene painter’s plastic and India ink markers on spun agricultural cloth.

I have offset the landscape drawings in this exhibition with a parallel series of object studies. These graphic derivés are by-products of other earlier investigations into the South African archive. For example the large “Shoe” is sourced from advertisements gleaned from grainy microfilm reels of Drum magazine. At the time I was investigating aspects of South African music history but was also drawn to the unrelated accompanying images showing iconic consumer objects—but barely visible through the darkened, poor, black and white, microfilm reproductions.

In this particular case, the shoe, perhaps a Jarman, definitely an American import, was at one time both a status symbol and a ubiquitous staple for men's dress in the 1950s and 60s. For me there was also a personal association in the memory of wearing similar shoes in my youth in the 1980s while in high-school. And perhaps this work echoes in some way an early work of mine from 1993 featuring a vitrine containing another generationally significant iconic shoe from a different decade: a pair of Doc Martens.

TIME / IMAGE

Curated by Amy Powell
Krannert Art Museum, Champaign, IL
January 29 - April 23, 2016
Siemon Allen, Matthew Buckingham, Allan deSouza, Andrea Geyer, Leslie Hewitt, Isaac Julien, Lorraine O’Grady, Trevor Paglen, Raqs Media Collective, Ruth Robbins, and Gary Simmons

Time / Image explores the interrelationship of time and thought in contemporary art. Curated by Amy L. Powell, curator of modern and contemporary art at Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and former Cynthia Woods Mitchell Curatorial Fellow at Blaffer Art Museum. Time / Image opened at the Blaffer in September 2015 before traveling to the Krannert Art Museum where it will be on view until April 2016.

The exhibition borrows its title and, loosely, its philosophical framework from French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995). Deleuze developed the concept of “the time-image” to describe what he felt to be a profound change in the perception of time brought about by post-World War II cinema. Through formal techniques such as cutting, montage, and repetition, cinema for Deleuze restated time as a tangible and active force with the potential to reach beyond the movie theater and into audiences’ experiences of the world at large.

Time / Image is organized around the work of 11 international artists and filmmakers–Siemon Allen, Matthew Buckingham, Allan deSouza, Andrea Geyer, Leslie Hewitt, Isaac Julien, Lorraine O’Grady, Trevor Paglen, Raqs Media Collective, Ruth Robbins, and Gary Simmons–who understand time expansively rather than quantitatively. These artists seek out and develop temporal strategies of representation across film, video, photography and painting that revive ghostly residues of the past, propose unexpected alignments across time periods, or reveal time-bending properties of their materials.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog with essays by Kara Keeling, Amy L. Powell, Raqs Media Collective, and Jeannine Tang. Along with illuminating the works in the exhibition, the publication will survey critical temporal interventions in film and video by John Akomfrah, Black Audio Film Collective, Robert Bresson, Cecilia Dougherty, Andrea Geyer, Djibril Diop Mambéty, Chris Marker, The Otolith Group, Raoul Peck, Semiconductor (Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt), Hito Steyerl, Clarissa Tossin, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Both venues will present dedicated screening programs featuring selected works drawn from this discussion.

Images courtesy of Krannert Art Museum

TIME / IMAGE

Curated by Amy Powell
Blaffer Art Museum, Houston, TX
September 28 - December 19, 2015
Siemon Allen, Matthew Buckingham, Allan deSouza, Andrea Geyer, Leslie Hewitt, Isaac Julien, Lorraine O’Grady, Trevor Paglen, Raqs Media Collective, Ruth Robbins, and Gary Simmons

Time / Image is organized around the work of 11 international artists and filmmakers–Siemon Allen, Matthew Buckingham, Allan deSouza, Andrea Geyer, Leslie Hewitt, Isaac Julien, Lorraine O’Grady, Trevor Paglen, Raqs Media Collective, Ruth Robbins, and Gary Simmons–who understand time expansively rather than quantitatively. These artists seek out and develop temporal strategies of representation across film, video, photography and painting that revive ghostly residues of the past, propose unexpected alignments across time periods, or reveal time-bending properties of their materials.

ReSOUNDINGS

Garth Erasmus and Siemon Allen
Curated by Julie McGee
Mechanical Hall Gallery, University of Delaware, DE
September 9 - December 11, 2015

Sound is an archeological and navigational tool for exploring the richly complicated terrain of South African history for artists Garth Erasmus and Siemon Allen. Through their work in ReSoundings we enter a world of South African chronologies and heritage deeply rooted and specific yet resonant beyond national borders.

Erasmus summons stories of the indigenous peoples for whom present-day Cape Town was home long before European contact and colonization. Their narratives of resistance and resilience inspire his sound art, seen and heard in ReSoundings. Allen’s work is informed by his on-going analysis of the Afrikaans folksong, “Daar Kom Die Alibama” (There Comes the Alabama) and its purported namesake the eponymous Confederate raider, CSS Alabama, which docked in the Cape in 1863 and 1864. Allen’s extensive archival research into its recorded history and its namesake underpins an artistic practice that is forensic and conceptual. His methodical collecting and data mining inform his conceptual construction, and our visual experience derives from the artist’s creative response to the archive.

Generated during his recent exploration of coastal regions in South Africa, Allen’s project investigates the complex relationships between the United States and South Africa through various maritime and colonial histories. Signal Hill, an eleven foot panoramic digital print mounted on a curved frame, shows the view toward Table Bay in Cape Town from Signal Hill, with Robben Island in the distance. In August of 1863 locals watched the Alabama capture the Union flagged Sea Bride from this vantage point. Ensign features 169 photographic details of the ships’s worn, hand-sewn flag. Raphael Semmes, the Alabama’s captain, presented the ship’s Confederate ensign to his agent in Cape Town during the ships’s last visit there in 1864. This Civil War artifact is today housed in the collection of Iziko Museums of South Africa.

For more information visit:
www.sites.udel.edu/museums/mechanical-hall-gallery/resoundings/

Siemon Allen and Garth Erasmus (photo by Julie McGee)

LABELS & COVERS

curated by Tosha Grantham
Second Street Gallery, Charlottesville, VA
September 4th - October 17, 2015

Siemon Allen will present Labels, an evolving architectural, site-responsive installation, at Second Street Gallery in Charlottesville, Virginia. Consisting of over 7000 digital prints sourced from his extensive archive of South African audio, this is the fourth and largest version of a work informed by an ongoing collection project of South African recordings. Through such projects Allen explores the image of South Africa in an evolving studio practice that considers how mass-produced items – newspapers, stamps, magazines, and records – transmit information and function in the construction of national identity.

Labels functions both as historical record and chronological discography. It also serves as a visual memorial to South Africa’s rich musical past – each label represents an individual recording that pays homage to that past by naming every artist in the archive. Some names and recordings are well known, but many more are now forgotten. As the project develops, names and labels are added to the curtain. But like an asymptote that never reaches its axis, the collection can never be complete. Inasmuch as the archive can never contain all recordings, the curtain cannot represent all artists. The project is but a fragment of history and the curtain an impossible attempt to capture that history. Like Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veteran’s War Memorial in Washington, DC, Allen suggests, “the sheer accumulation of ‘the individual’ transforms the collective into the monumental.”

Allen's solo exhibition at Second Street marks the first time Labels will be presented in the United States. Previous versions of Labels have been shown in the South African Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale, at Goodman Gallery Cape and the Iziko Slave Lodge Cultural History Museum in Cape Town, South Africa. In addition to Labels, Allen will include Covers a series of digital prints sourced from selected details of record covers in his audio archive. A searchable web-based database of the audio archive can be viewed at www.flatinternational.org.

There will be an opening reception on September 4th, from 5:30- 7:30 pm, with a talk by the artist at 6:30 pm. On closing day, Saturday, October 17th, Second Street Gallery will host an artist/curator conversation from 4-5 pm with Allen, David Noyes, a Central and Southern African music specialist, and exhibition curator Tosha Grantham.

www.secondstreetgallery.org

EXHIBITION - INTERVIEW

Reynolds Gallery, Richmond VA
January 10 - February 15, 2014
Amanda Dalla Villa Adams recently conducted an email interview with Siemon Allen discussing his exhibition at Reynolds Gallery. Her review of the exhibition is featured in the critic pics at ArtForum.com.

Amanda Dalla Villa Adams: What is the relationship between the newer studio-based pieces and the older/reworked ideas associated with the comics, woven film strips, and stamps? (I understand that these are all new works made specifically for "Exhibition")

Siemon Allen: My goal for the exhibition was to use it as an opportunity to explore a fragmented and experimental combination of new and old ideas. In varied degrees all the works on this show return to or reference earlier projects. My first exhibition (at the ICA in Johannesburg) after leaving art school in 1993 included many of the eclectic and personal themes explored in Exhibition: the model houses, stamps and other collected artifacts, and woven work (not to mention an audio artifact from my CD collection). At that time I was interested in ideas of display, presentation and ownership and perhaps it is not a far leap to see those ideas extend into “exhibition” here.

The studio-based pieces likewise reference this early body of work from my first exhibition. That early work included a series of small scale models of houses or spaces I had lived in. I returned again to that work in 1999 when I build a half-scale model of my parent’s home in South Africa in cardboard at Gallery 400 in Chicago during a residency there. At that time I was quite interested in the idea of the room-within-a-room, an installation theme that returns often in my other work (see the Stamps installation and others.) The Gallery 400 exhibition was called House and it in turn became the subject of another later piece titled Gallery in which I made a smaller scale model of both Gallery 400 and the installation. For the model piece Exhibition in this current show I returned to many of these themes by exploring the merging of a model of the current exhibition space with my current studio and home. More information on the "room-within-the-room" concept can be viewed at my website.

The Queen stamp piece was originally conceived of in 2007 but only executed in late 2013. Initially it was simply a side project to keep my mind off the Makeba! collection project I was working on at that time. Certainly Queen could also be viewed as a by-product of the larger South African stamp collection project — after all while sifting out the South African stamps, these queen (or Machin) stamps were some of the notable that remained after sorting. Of course, it is significant that, while all the queen stamps were produced in the UK they were all sent on envelopes to (and therefore collected in) South Africa. So on the face it may appear that the Queen work seems like a fresh departure, it is however indelibly linked to the other earlier projects.

Studio (the large floating print) is probably the most recent of all the pieces but it too has roots in earlier work for example the large-scale scan enlargements I made of records in 2009 and 2010. At that time I was already experimenting with scanning other materials and objects in high detail and also had the notion to shift to different surfaces. I scanned my studio floor and enlarged the image by about 1000%. The effect, like in the Records prints, is to bring the viewer closer to the surface, something akin to a microscopic view.

La Grande Illusion continues a long path of woven film works that I have explored since art school. Here I repurposed an original 16 mm copy of Jean Renoir's classic 1937 anti-war film: La Grande Illusion. I have appropriated 16 mm film a number of times in previous works, but this is only the second using a high profile named film. The first was Hitchcock's The Birds, made in South Africa in 2008. The woven VHS pieces go all the way back to my first exhibition at the ICA in Johannesburg in 1993 followed by the large-scale installation La Jetée I installed at the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale in 1997.

Naglegioen II is a reworking of a piece I first exhibited at Fusebox in Washington DC in 2004. The first version consisted entirely of Xerox enlargements of an Afrikaans photo-comic from the 1970s. With this new version I chose to scan the original comic thus retaining much of the aged sepia tone of the paper. This approach gives the work the effect of being dipped in urine. Like the Tintin work, Land of Black Gold, that accompanied the original version of Naglegioen, the speech bubbles here have all been erased.

ADVA: Are Studio and Exhibition in progress or finished works? If in progress, in what direction do you see these works evolving? (Julia Monroe at Reynolds Gallery mentioned that the model could be architecturally expanded to include more exhibition spaces. How large might the model become?)

SA: Exhibition (the model piece), at the moment, consists of three merged replicas of actual spaces that I am currently working or living in, each at slightly different scales: 1) Reynolds Gallery, 2) my studio and 3) my home. The Reynolds Gallery model includes small scale versions of the artwork I presented in the actual exhibition, while the studio and home models included real-scale drawings I had made last year. (Practically I used the Reynolds model to site the show.) My goal is to continue adding to the work many of my previous and possible future exhibition spaces with other living spaces as well. Each of the spaces might include exact replicas of the artwork that I showed or plan to show there but I am hoping to mix it up and may diverge from that approach by including artwork ideas that differ from the real world spaces. This may include fictional future work that may never come to fruition in the actual space. Ultimately this model installation would expand like an irrational apartment block filling the exhibition space until many of the central spaces become inaccessible and only the outer spaces allow for viewer engagement.

Studio at Reynolds Gallery is an extract of the full work. It is about about two thirds the size of the original scan of my studio floor. I would eventually like to show the full work. I am also considering expanding the project to scanning additional floors and surfaces, perhaps including some sites with particular social content.

ADVA: Could you expand more on the slippage that happens with Studio? Specifically, I am thinking about its relationship between painting/sculpture, flat/raised surface, aesthetic object/topographical map, studio/exhibition space.

SA: Though trained as a sculptor, I have always been interested in merging 3D and 2D practices (mostly without paint). Some of my works, like the woven pieces, simultaneously reference painting as well as film, but I always take care to include the depth dimension, no matter how slight it may be. The woven pieces are particularly complex: are they a collection of photographs, minimalist paintings, representations of films or simply craft objects like hanging carpets?

Likewise Studio, has similar slippages. Can it be viewed as image of object? Is it a photograph, and if so, does a scanner constitute a camera? With this new work, I am interested in how this seemingly simple idea can generate such a rich body of references. On one level it just a small fragment of a Richmond floor, but magnified in scale all the mundane details, bits of tape, dog hair, burn marks all become curious and engaging documents of a history of layered activities. The work also references a topography and two feet of floor space becomes a large scale map similar to those seen in Google earth. The “plane” is a studio floor but it could also be a battlefield, it is both micro and macro, local and global.

Conceptually I am also interested in the idea that Studio references the historical moment when Jackson Pollock shifted his practice to the floor. Unlike Pollock though I am returning this document of actions to the floor. The large-scale print captures historical actions, (mine, my friends, previous owners) that have serendipitously built up over many years on this surface (my studio used to be a paint shop in the 1960s here in Richmond, VA). As a South African artist coming to the United States I have always viewed the Abstract-Expressionists and the scale of their work as quintessentially American. In many ways the scale of my works, the Stamps, the Newspapers, Studio, are ways that I acknowledge and deal with this American context. It is unlikely that I would have made similar work in South Africa.

ADVA: Is there any relationship between the works in "Exhibition" and the database you are composing of South African music? Because the database mimics the language of an historical archive, do you see yourself as both a historian and artist?

SA: There are some very slim connections between these new works and the archive of South African music. On one level this new work is a mental break from that larger endeavor. But the idea of say an archive of UK stamps sent to South Africa, or the appropriation of an apartheid-era Afrikaans photo-comic, or even a repurposed historical anti-war film, do suggest, in my mind, some elliptical connections to the larger archive project. Probably the most obvious connection, though, is that I am planning to include a miniature version of the Labels curtain (the installation that developed out of the South African Audio Archive currently on show at the Slave Lodge in Cape Town) in one of the model spaces.