To meander is not the same as to walk from point to point. Aside from being less direct it also implies a kind of dallying and teasing out of things that marching from place to place simply does not accomplish. All the artworks in Fran Siegel’s show “Chronicle,” curated by jill moniz, have a soft-spoken quality. The works, composed primarily of fabric and porcelain, are circular and spiraling—the soft material aggregates are loosely hung on threads with pins on the walls. The color gamut runs primarily to light blues and white.

Siegel is introspective and fragmentary. There are different weaves of fabric—some loose, others tightly knit. The more gauze-like lets the light from the wall reflect through and offset the nearby colors. There is an occasional shimmering that occurs from a moiré effect of viewing one swatch through another more broadly woven one. Using the matte quality of flashe paint, patterns that are insinuated or transformed are merged more effectively than they would be with a higher gloss finish. There’s a subtlety determining what the original pattern was and what the superimposed one does. It’s a slower unveiling because there’s less contrast between the added paint and the printed cloth substrata.

Fran Siegel, Dispersed Painting/Cloud, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Wilding Cran Gallery.

Throughout the show are porcelain elements that often sustain these low reliefs, or cluster in the center of a work and collect the myriad of threads holding it all together. With these subtle intrusions, the artist infuses these airy works with a connection to the world of trade and how that privileges some at the expense of others. The circular forms themselves appear to be like Delft Blue plates finely embellished with the same blue that is in the artist’s embedded cyanotypes. Even the cyanotype process with its fugitive relationship to light conjures up the issue of hierarchy—of what is retained and what is discarded. Whether they are pinwheels or swirling umbrella tops or circular devices, these maps go spiral outwards from the center, while also traversing lines drawn in thread from the center to the diameter. Siegel’s overall approach involves patternmaking and abstraction through which she teases out occasionally conflicting relationships between systems and iconographies. In many cases it causes the viewer to think about processes that go beyond art and into commercial practices.

Within the work Nine (2021) there are indeed nine slices but rather than retain a clear boundary the cross-hatched curvilinear lines, dots and dashes weave across the surface in an unpredictable pattern. At the very center of this work an almost amulet eyelet-form collects different parts of the thread to itself. With its slight convexity, this work leans into the viewer’s perceptual field beckoning for a closer perusal, inviting one to draw out their own reveries.

Fran Siegel: Chronicle
Wilding Cran Gallery
On view through March 4, 2023