PRESS RELEASE
Since moving to Southern California from New York, Siegel’s work has increasingly focused on the interplay between coastal light, space and geography. These interests are articulated in the installation The Eye of the Contour, where Siegel employs wall drawings and the assemblage of everyday materials in depicting and emphasizing atmospheric phenomena. Light-altering agents, such as magnifying lenses, mirrors and colored film, are layered over a fifty-foot wall drawing in which delicately delineated lines represent close-up images of eroded surfaces and cracked earth. Projecting from the walls, twisted wires and jagged sheets of Plexiglas serve as contour lines describing terrain and density shifts.
The artist’s use of wire functions as a kind of drawing in space, where the actual perceptual experience of line in space is juxtaposed with the depiction of topography on a two-dimensional surface. Siegel’s installation ultimately aims to create a highly subjective space, one that requires from the viewer a durational engagement of looking and participation.
Fran Siegel recently received an Individual Artist Fellowship from The City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. In April 2007, she will have a solo exhibition at the newly opened Torrance Art Museum in the Los Angeles area. Siegel’s work resides in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, TX and the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, CT, as well as in numerous corporate collections. Her exhibitions have received national attention in publications like Art in America and The New York Times.