Preview article on exhibition by Paul Sietsema
“Sietsema’s current exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery demonstrates this practice in full maturity. The new works on the ground floor (with their unplugged rotary telephones and paint-soaked CDs) exist as archaeological artefacts of our own recent past, whilst the earlier pieces in the basement reveal the artist’s commitment to excavating the material memory embedded in cultural objects. Together, they confirm Sietsema as one of contemporary art’s most rigorous investigators of how meaning accretes through the physical residue of use, time, and exchange. In an era defined by the dematerialised circulation of images, his insistence on the thereness of objects (their weight, their decay, their indexical traces) offers a counterpoint, reminding us that even in reproduction, something material remains.”
