Steven Siegel currently lives and works in upstate New York. He received his MFA from Pratt Institute, and an MA and BA from Hampshire College in Amherst. He has received numerous grants and awards and has completed site sculptures and installations within the United States and abroad. Siegel was the Martin and Doris Rosen Award winner in 1998 when he created the site-specifc work Squeeze 2 for Appalachian’s 12th Rosen Outdoor Sculpture program. Siegel says of this new body of work, “This series was completed in 2008, 6 years after its accidental inception. The title is shared with the 1989 publication by Stephen Jay Gould. Gould described the matrix of life forms found in the fossil record of the Burgess Shale in British Columbia, a variety that he believed has never been surpassed in the history of our planet. Evolutionary biology has rich parallels to the creative process and the development of craft. This series of 52 wall pieces is about the simple, cumulative changes that generate form, from generation to generation. There being no wolves, competition for mates, or climate change to force natural selection in the studio, that determinate has been the artist’s eye; what we used to call sensibility.”
John Perreault, noted author and critic says of Siegel’s work, “…Siegel is not illustrating geological sedimentation or the Cambrian Explosion, he is appropriating principles of operation. John Cage, the great American composer and thinker, recommended that artists of all kinds not imitate nature’s results, but nature’s methodology… This is, I feel, what Siegel is doing and is what unites what might otherwise seem to be a caesura in his body of work. He is utilizing nature’s methodology. However, he has not fastened upon the aleatory but upon the incremental.”
The Turchin Center is proud to premiere this new body of work in honor of the 25th anniversary of An Appalachian Summer Festival. After opening at the center, the exhibition will travel nationally through 2010. Siegel returns to campus in September where he will work with students from the departments of Art and Biology.
