Fran Siegel. Chronicle.

About

Wilding Cran Gallery is pleased to present Fran Siegel, Chronicle, curated by jill moniz of Transformative Arts. Chronicle is the culmination of recent works that express Siegel’s contemplation of place, dreams and perspectives.

Chronicle features 216 small drawings on paper that Siegel started at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. She visualized the discourse around the virus as extensions of her focus on pinwheel and maps, as a shorthand of place, and the aesthetics approaching abstraction. moniz pairs these ephemeral works with Siegel’s painted tapestries that incorporate porcelain as armatures, structural hardware that deciphers colonial appropriation and cultural production.

The exhibition offers multiple entry points into dialogues that magnify how making transforms moments, from staged and beautiful, to essential and abject. Siegel’s works are intimate in scale, reflecting how the pandemic dictated her process and inspired introspective collaging of dreams, news and opportunities, unpacking and reassembling iconography that influences how we interpret and shape our worlds.

In her consideration of patterns and pinwheels, Siegel draws out form, emphasizing how we record our relationship to each other and the landscape, and how intricately and intimately connected we are. Siegel’s pinwheels represent for moniz a fulcrum of visual language that expands and focuses our attention on both specificity and plurality of experiences that benefit from collective empathy. Chronicle explores moniz and Siegel’s shared commitment to the depth and complexity of cultural associations foundational to place, and meaning making through art practice.

Siegel isolates, examines, then rearticulates visual elements that have strong formal qualities as well as social currency. Using porcelain, African Dutch cloth, cyanotype, Flashe paint and media that evoke global perspectives, her approach approximates abstraction teasing out iconographies from historic porcelain pieces, the upholstery on a chair at Kyle Rittenhouse’s trial, to the pattern on Joan Didion’s sweater. She elongates patterns, turning well-known imagery inside out where unconventional, found and sometimes simple materials like denim and string reimagine familiar shapes in unique compositions.

Chronicle is experienced as a noun, and a verb signifying the intersections of visual language and storytelling. moniz’s focal point centers on Siegel’s balance of imagery and materials that are historically narrative devices. Together they offer a collection of self-referential, dimensional paintings that depict a landscape of resonant ideas, feelings and vistas.