Private View: Tuesday, 26 April 4-8pm
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 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.
